Problem with animated Vray lights affecting referenced environment

[3lateral]

Hello,

We have come across a very strange problem with animated Vray lights and file referencing in Maya. In short, animated Vray lights (animated translation) used to light referenced geometry do not render properly on render farm. They render ok only on workstations used to create them- on all others they render as self illuminated planes but they don't cast light. This remains consistent regardless of workstation we try this on.

We need to use file referencing on our project due to complexity of scenes and organization of project and this is a pretty big problem for us as we have a lot of animated lights. We can consistently reproduce the problem. We have also made sure that problem is not with UNC paths, all machines are similar and use exactly the same software: Win7 64bit, Maya2012 64bit and V-Ray for Maya version 2.20.01 from Feb 1 2012

I have attached two rendered frames from example scene we prepared.

Help with this would be much appreciated.

Many thanks,
Vladimir Mastilovic

[vlado]

Can you get us a scene for this to vraymaya@chaosgroup.com ? I can't think right away what would be causing it so it would be best to look at the scene.

Best regards,
Vlado

[3lateral]

Just sent the scene. Thanks Vlado!

Best regards,
Vladimir Mastilovic

[3lateral]

Ok, I doubt many people ran into this one but just in case somebody does- it seems that current version has an issue with animated lights illuminating referenced geometry while being set to Watts. Switching back to default units and everything else remaining the same, resolved the issue.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Hi Vladimir,

Do you use Maya batch? It's not a rendering bug, but an issue during the scene opening. If you are able to open the scene properly on the master machine, you can export to vrscene. Since we've dropped support for old verions of Maya (like 200, I will reimplement this functionality in more reliable way.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

The issue is happening when loading file with references if vray plugin was not already loaded. So you can also check this as a work around. I will fix it in the nightlies.