Lighting difference between render buckets

[sebbiej]

Hi all,

I keep on getting slight lighting differences between render buckets when I use distributed rendering, mainly when I use a HDR file linked up to a V-Ray Dome Light. All of my slaves are on Windows 10, running V-Ray 3.6. It's happened with the past few versions of V-Ray before this and it's bugged me, but I've never got around to asking for a fix! Would anybody know why this happens? You can see it in the image below, in the shadowy areas beneath the plate.
It seems to rendering fine via backburner, when each frames is rendered on a separate PC, but in the frame buffer where they're all working together, it ends up like this.

Whilst I'm here, is it possible to have a Apple Mac Pro used on a Windows 10 render farm (our 8-10 PCs), with distributed rendering and Backburner? A Mac Pro has just come up for us to use, but I've no idea of how to go about setting it up!

Many thanks,

Seb

[yolov]

Could you check to make sure that all your slaves and the client machine (the one starting the render) are using the exact same version of VRay? You can run a vray.exe -version command on the slaves and it will return a version number and a build number.
If all versions are exactly the same, then this might be a bug, in which case it would be easier if you could share the scene so we can run some tests and find out what's wrong.

As for a mixed OS setup - I don't know about backburner, but DR should be running well, it supports mixed OS setups, meaning that Maya can run on any OS and then the DR slaves can run on any OS as well (win client + osx slaves or osx client and windows slaves etc).
As for DR setup, all you need to do is download and run the OSX installer on the Mac and choose "Standalone Only" when prompted by the VRay installer. Then you'll have a DR slave installed on that machine and you can use it for rendering.

[sebbiej]

Hi Alex,

I've checked the version of V-Ray on the render slaves on our system, and they're all running version 3.60.03. I installed the latest V-ray for Maya on every PC a short while ago. There will be previous versions of V-Ray installed on the PCs under our past installs of Maya 2017/2016 etc... I'm not sure if I'd maybe need to uninstall these versions?

Thanks for the info on the mixed OS setup, I'll have a go at getting this running this week. I had installed Maya 2018 (but not unlocked it) on the Mac, and installed Vray for Maya on it, but I was having a message like "this PC actively refused it", or something along those lines. I'll uninstall what I did and just try to put on the standalone version instead!

I've uploaded the Maya scene here, anyway. (The animation isn't great, but its just a little test that I was working on :P )

https://we.tl/nCn9lAbnHZ

Thanks for the help!

[sebbiej]

I think I may have solved the problem... I deleted all previous versions of V-Ray from our render slaves, and the lighting seems to be consistent now throughout the image.

[yolov]

Hmm, there might be an explanation for this - if something was not correct in the environment, a version of vray could have loaded plugins from another version and might have caused this.