Vray 2.4 for Maya 2014 (Win x64) - Distributed Rendering machines not picking up

[stwagstaff]

We have an excruciatingly-difficult problem where distributed rendering works fine in a particular project file if we use a simple scene with a few textures. The remote machines pick up normally and the whole thing renders fast. However, using a larger scene, the machines on the network never pick up. Only the local machine gets added to the render. I have checked and eliminated firewall issues and blocked ports -- with the simple scene, everything goes through fine. Also, I tried rendering the production scene using only a single Vray shader with no texture map, but I have the same problem -- remote machines don't pick up. The simple scene 400 spheres, with a vray shader with a file texture) in the project file renders with all the machines in the network, no problem, but the 5K production scene, with a bunch of objects and a dozen or so file textures, in the same project, never gets the remote machines added in, so it takes forever to render. Any suggestions as to why this would happen? Is there some kind of time-out flag related to the time it takes for the remote machines to load the scene, for example?

Vray 2.4 for Maya 2014 (Win x64) on a Windows Domain network.


Thanks,
Sean

[t.petrov]

The best thing you can do is to inspect all logs.
By all, I mean logs produced by maya and all the slaves.
In the maya log you should see that it tries to connect to host1, host2, host3 and it will print if the connection is successful or not.
In the slave logs you should see if somebody tries to connect to the slave and from what IP and if the connection is allowed or not.

Please inspect these logs and report if you see some strange things in them.

Are you running the slaves as Windows services through VRayForMayaSpawner?