Never finishing Frames with Distributed Rendering and Bucket Mode

[haniel1107]

Hello, needless to say that Vray for C4D today is wonderful, but it would be a dream if you could find a solution for these never finishing buckets at distributed rendering.
I have invested into 3 good performing nodes in hardware and chaos DR licences, but the benefit is very poor through these never finishing buckets compared to single rendering.
It is frustrating when rendering animations, the Frame is nearly rendered in record speed, but not finished through these one or two buckets which need another 3 minutes.
When rendering animations, this is really bad…
I think this is one of the oldest issues which exists since the beginning.

If you have a tip, how to get handled this, … much appreciated.
Thanks

[daCaMo]

Same here!!

I always thought it had something to do with my scenes! When my 3 DR computers are working on the last frames it takes forever until the image is finished. Especially when I have a lot of objects with refraction.

[haniel1107]

Yes, indeed with refraction... but progressive rendering seems not to have this problem, or it is just not visible.. but for me it is not so efficient to render progressive with DR

[haniel1107]

Right now I am rendering an animation with not so much refraction…. but never the less rendering with my working machine is is much faster than with DR. This is not normal. Solo Rendering Bucket mode 1 Frame 4min / DR 1 Frame 7 min
The bucket of the nodes are joining after a minute the rendering but at the end randomly 2-3 bucket need some minutes. For example this actual animation, if these never ending buckets wouldn’t be there and the rendering would act like at solo rendering, DR would save me nearly 2 minutes per frame.. which is a lot..

Main pc: Threadripper 3990X 128 GB Win 11
3x Nodes: 2x Xeon E5-2699 v4 128GB Win 10
10 GB Network

Maybe you could bring back the manual setting for bucket size - until chaos fixes this issue…?
I can imagine small buckets would work much better.

Hope there comes any solution in near future and hoping the money for hardware and DR licenses was not wasted…

[zhanet.georgieva]

Hi haniel1107 and daCaMo,

I am sorry to hear that you are currently experiencing issues with our software. To investigate the issue, can you please share some additional information:
- Share screenshots of the problem
- Specify if the problem with buckets occurs only in particular frames or if it happens randomly throughout the scene
- Share the versions of V-Ray and Cinema 4D that you are using. Make sure that these versions are the same across all machines
- Reproduce the issue and send us the latest VRayLog.txt file. You can find this file in the temp folder on each machine. The correct directory is C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Temp or simply enter %temp% in the file explorer. Collect logs from all machines involved in the Distributed Rendering (DR) process.
- If possible, share your scene with us for investigation. Save the scene with all assets using File>Save Project with Assets

Please share these details here or if you prefer, you can open a ticket in our system.

[haniel1107]

Hello zhanet.georgieva, thank you for taking care of this.
I can't share this scene, but it happens more or less with every scene.
I have a driving scene with rocks, street, many trees from the cosmo library in a cloner object.
The never ending buckets happen randomly but most frequently on leaves, or headlamps with lights and refraction...

Using C4D R2023.2.2 Latest Vraz 6.2 nightly build.
But this happens also R2024..

I don't think this is a local problem, honestly I think this is a generell problem.. and should be easy to reproduce... But I will collect these log files and send them to you..

Thank you..

[haniel1107]

Hello zhanet.georgieva, I've created a new heavy scene with a generic car to show you an example.
Please have a look to the 3 screenshots.
Pic is at minute 1, when all Nodes joined


Pic 2 is at minute 10, all nodes are done since about 2 minutes.. but two buckets which rendering from the beginning are still working


Pic 3 is at minute 14, when the rendering finished...


With my original scene it is even more worst...

Is there a way to set bucket size to small for all? Maybe this would help for now?


If you like I can share this scene with you, but it happens nearly with all scenes with DR and I guess chaos is aware of this problem...
Is there someone working on this at chaos?

Thanks

[haniel1107]

Hello again, I have searched the forum for this topic and it seems that there are problems with DR not only with Cinema 4D. And this has been the case for a long time.
Since there is somehow no concrete statement about it... I would like to ask if the topic DR currently plays a role and if Chaos is working on it at all?

[Nejc Kilar]

Hm hm, if you want to make the buckets smaller you can do that by selecting the Bucket sampler and then go under "Render region division" just underneath the sampler settings. In there you can input your own bucket size.

Hope that helps!

[haniel1107]

Hm hm, if you want to make the buckets smaller you can do that by selecting the Bucket sampler and then go under "Render region division" just underneath the sampler settings. In there you can input your own bucket size.

Hope that helps!

Wow, I've overseen this all the time... I am speechless.. Thank you very much!! I will test it direclty, hope this brings the hoped effect with DR...
Thanks again!

[haniel1107]

same render time... my hope was greater than my knowledge

[zhanet.georgieva]

Hi haniel1107,

I've run tests, and everything is working as expected on my end. Could you please submit a ticket and share your scene for further testing?

[haniel1107]

Hi haniel1107,

I've run tests, and everything is working as expected on my end. Could you please submit a ticket and share your scene for further testing?

Hello zhanet.georgieva, thank you for taking the time. I will send you my original file, different from the screenshot, where I think the difference between DR and Solo is better visible.
Looking forward to your results... thank you.