LightSelect not rendering command line

[frueter]

Hi,

it seems that "Light Select" render elements do not render when the nuke script is run via command line (i.e. render farm). The resulting exr contains all other render elements but not the "light select" ones.
When I render in the GUI I get what I expect but obviously that is not practical.
Can you please look at the attached nuke script and see if you can reproduce the issue?
This is an example command line to render the first frame:
Nuke10.5 -V -f -X Write_LAKE -x vray_light_select_test.nk 1

I'm kind of stuck in production without this working

Cheers,
frank

[Christophe.Cot]

I am looking at it right now. That's odd there is a problem with that because internally we have some automated tests running basically rendering different nuke script in terminal mode and one of the test scene concerns the light select and that's render fine.
I will let you know once I have more info.

[frueter]

Thank you. It's a pretty crucial feature I need to not fall behind my production schedule so hopefully there is a workaround.

[frueter]

Hi Christophe. I just spent about an hour debugging this and found that if the film gate ("haperture") is set to a non-default value non of the light select AOVs will output anything.
when setting the haperture to it's default value of 24.57600021 the AOVs are rendered as expected.
Attached is my debug script with a working and a broken camera (difference is only the haperture value).

I will work around this by utilising the "override FOV" option so I can actually render things again, but this seems to be a severe bug so hopefully it can get fixed soon.

Cheers,
frank

[Christophe.Cot]

Hi Frueter,
I have identified the source of the problem which unfortunately happens in some specific situation that affects how scene structure is created and how Nuke might decide to instantiate nodes connected in the dag graph.
This behavior unfortunately seems to be different when rendering via command line. Fun fact is that it will even behaves differently when directly rendering in GUI mode, or rendering a script through cmd line via direct script execution (-X) or via python script execution.
I already had to workaround this behavior before so this is fixable.
I should come up with something next week.

[frueter]

Nice, thanks Christophe!

[frueter]

Hmmm. As much as my tests yielded 100% success when run locally, rendering via Deadline still produces black for the light select AOVs.
Is there anything I can do to re-arrange my nodes to make it work until there is a fix? This is getting mission critical now

[frueter]

Are these warnings related?
[22:23.11] Warning: VRayTexBitmap1: Knob:color_space. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: VRayTexBitmap1: Knob:render_format. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: VRayTexBitmap26: Knob:color_space. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: VRayTexBitmap26: Knob:render_format. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: VRayTexBitmap3: Knob:color_space. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: VRayTexBitmap3: Knob:render_format. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: VRayTexBitmap6: Knob:color_space. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: VRayTexBitmap6: Knob:render_format. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: VRayTexBitmap24: Knob:color_space. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: VRayTexBitmap24: Knob:render_format. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: VRaySunSky2: Knob:target_distance. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: Light Select2: Knob:channel. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: Light Select1: Knob:channel. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: Light Select: Knob:channel. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: ZDepth1: Knob:channel. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: Sample Rate1: Knob:channel. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.
[22:23.11] Warning: Self Illum: Knob:channel. Setting knob values from validate is not supported and may cause unexpected behaviour.

[Christweil]

Hmmm. As much as my tests yielded 100% success when run locally, rendering via Deadline still produces black for the light select AOVs.
Is there anything I can do to re-arrange my nodes to make it work until there is a fix? This is getting mission critical now

Nothing has been proven reliable enough to hack this specific behavior of Nuke to pseudo randomly instantiate node as it wants so I have no workaround unfortunately.
I have different way to fix it and I am very confident it will work.
The warning you see is unrelated.