Cannot get Standalone Vray DR to work on Mac and and DR hangs in Maya above 1024

[3Dmotif]

Ok so I have a huge mural that I need to render. I mean billboard size! I can start a DR in Maya and it works just fine at a test resolution something like 1024 wide. But if I got to a test at say 4096 I get to the point where all of the image have loaded on all of the machine and it just hangs on the master

All machines are MacPros running Mavericks.

I can run a batch render from the command line and use "Render -r vray -preRender "setAttr \"vraySettings.sys_distributed_rendering_on\" 1;" test.ma" and I get the same result

so I have exported to a vrscene file and I'm trying to render using standalone and DR.

The problem I keep getting is not matter how I seem to word the syntax I get a:

error: Error parsing command line

even if I take away every option but the scene file :

vray -sceneFile=/Volumes/Projects/City\ Town\ Engineering/uberRig/uberRig/scenes/uberRig_Camera_3_w_lights.vrscene

returns the same error I even tried putting quotes around it same thing


here is the whole command line I was trying to run:

vray -sceneFile="/Volumes/Projects/City\ Town\ Engineering/uberRig/uberRig/scenes/uberRig_Camera_3_w_lights.vrscene" -distributed=1 -renderhost="10.1.10.91;10.1.10.122;10.1.10.201;10. 1.10.123;10.1.10.108" -imgFile="/Volumes/Projects/City\ Town\ Engineering/uberRig/uberRig/images/Vray_DRTEst.exr"

yes I know that my names have spaces in them but the above syntax works just fine for the terminal and usually for maya using the terminal as above. Anyway if someone can tell me what Im doing wrong I would greatly appreciate it I really need to get this done and turned into the client.

Thanx,

James

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Hello James,

First of all some mixture between Front and Back Slashes persist in the path - not sure which is the right one on Mac OS but please try use only one of those symbols in path name:

vray -sceneFile=/Volumes/Projects/City/ Town/ Engineering/uberRig/uberRig/scenes/uberRig_Camera_3_w_lights.vrscene

or

vray -sceneFile=\Volumes\Projects\City\ Town\ Engineering\uberRig\uberRig\scenes\uberRig_Camera_ 3_w_lights.vrscene

Second, not sure if this only exists on that page or it persist originally in the command but there are some spaces in the path name value and also into the renderhost value - please make sure that there aren't any unwanted spaces in the entire command - spaces could only persist between the attributes.

vray -sceneFile=\Volumes\Projects\City\Town\Engineering\ uberRig\uberRig\scenes\uberRig_Camera_3_w_lights.v rscene

Let us know if the issue still persist after you've tried these tips.

[t.petrov]

First of all some mixture between Front and Back Slashes persist in the path - not sure which is the right one on Mac OS but please try use only one of those symbols in path name:

In fact both symbols are fine in his path.
The path separator is '/' on OSX. The '\' symbol is used to escape the next symbol, so the space won't be treated as an end of the argument for the command.

Unfortunately our command line parsing code doesn't support paths with spaces.
I've tried similar render command on linux and it failed with the same error.
Quoting the arguments doesn't work either.

I'll log an issue in our tracker. Thank you for reporting this problem.
The only thing you could do to workaround it is to use paths without spaces or other special characters.

[vlado]

Try this, it should work fine.

vray -sceneFile=\"/Volumes/Projects/City\ Town\ Engineering/uberRig/uberRig/scenes/uberRig_Camera_3_w_lights.vrscene\"

Best regards,
Vlado

[3Dmotif]

ok that got me rendering but I still am encountering a similar thing I was seeing in maya. I and DR render wight eh resolution at about 1500 across and around 900 vert and the render starts super fast the buckets all populate and contribute. the render goes blistering fast and the whole things renders in about 30-45 seconds. I take that same scene and turn the image up to 4096 across and all of the sudden even though the buckets are the same exact size they take forever to even start and they all take forever..

I changed nothing but the resolution not change in quality and I'm roughly rending 16x the number of buckets that is all. Yet I can let this run all night and it will still be on pre-pass 1 and about a 1/4 of the image done for that pass. This sounds like a bug to me. and I have to be able to render this thing at about 16K across.

[vlado]

Are you sure this is related to DR? What happens if you render locally? Other than that, do you have any displacement or subdivision surfaces in the scene?

Best regards,
Vlado

[3Dmotif]

the slow down happens locally on a single machine as well if the resolution is turned up. there is no displacement or subdivision surfaces.

I got the DR to work but it doesn't seem that information is getting to all render nodes having some really strange things going on now.

it seems that Secondary rays are not being calculated for all surfaces on all machines. like I found that when I would loo at the RawGI none of the blocks were there for the DR machines.

I got around this by rendering the GI on a single machine and then using irradiance and LightCache that I saved to a file I could render and get GI values for every DR node.

But I'm still having a VERY strange problem. I still not getting reflection values from "SOME" surfaces in the DR squares.

look:



here is the DR map 3dm-defiant is the master machine.



it seems to also be different material no returned in different DR nodes.

[3Dmotif]

Also why the GI and and Pre-Passes not use all of the CPU? Mine is never going over about 35-40% and usually around 25%.

on a 8 core machine with 16 threads the cpu gauges shout sometimes. one thread peaking and then other times every other one going to about half way.
But CPU usage never peaks until the actual rending starts.

And I just looked at the rendering running on a single machine only turned the resolution to 4K and the pre pass is still going after 7 hrs it is about 15-20% done with the pre-pass. At this rate gonna about 36 hours to render the pre pass at 4K.

Dont understand how 16 times the number of pixels takes 360 times longer to render.

oh and not sure if I said this but this is the main production build off the main site downloads section.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Thank you very much for the shared information - some of the issues you've reported indeed look like a bugs.
In order to find out if the issues are caused by a bug or anything else we will need your scene (maya-scene and vrscene) + all external assets for investigation.
May you confirm that the issues you are facing when rendering in Maya and VrayStandalone are the same ?

According to the missing information on DR-nodes - have you tried to turn on Transfer Missing Maps feature in DR-options ? Make sure that all the DR-slaves could access every external asset related to the project. If you have any firewall enabled please stop it temporary and perform another test. If the issue still persist afterwards please copy Vray-log files from workstation and slave machines immediately after the test is done and send them to us.

According to CPU usage issue - if you are using Irradiance Map and Light Cache for GI calculation please make sure that Show Calculation Phase in both is OFF. Let us know if there is any improvement or it renders with the same speed and CPU-usage.

Let us know which is the exact Vray and Maya version you are using, how many machines participate in DR-rendering, how much RAM each machine have installed.

Finally, all those issues persist only on that scene or they occur in other scenes too ?

[3Dmotif]

Ok I will gather this up when I get to the office. FYI about 8 more block have filled in since my post last night.

also All o the textures are showing up. the only files textures are on the people in the scene and They are all fine in every pass except for the reflection pass. Also I have watched the terminal windows on the slave machine and all say that they found and loaded the textures successfully.

Also I don't see a transfer missing maps option in the DR setting I have a checkbox for turning DR on and a setting button that only has which hosts to use.

[3Dmotif]

also where would I find the logs on the DR machine in OSX?

[3Dmotif]

Sent PM to svetlozar_draganov Vlado you inbox is full mate!

sent copy to support@chaosgroup.com as well

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Thanks for the scene - we are testing it now.
We will update you as soon as we have some news about it.