Trouble using batch rendering (and animations) with the DR Spawners

[ANDREW_DECKER]

Is anyone else having this problem or is it just me? I am using Rhino 5 (x64) and Vfr 1.5. I have a network with 7 machines plus the host. The Spawners work beautifully for a single rendering. My problem is when I use any of the batch renderers (Badger, VrayBatchRenderer_V2, RenderAll) the first rendering works perfectly and finds all the hosts. Then when it launches the second rendering it doesn't find any of the hosts saying that they are busy. The problem seems to be an about 5 second lag between when the rendering is done and when the hosts are ready to accept the next job. So the next rendering gets sent to the hosts before they are ready. I never had this problem with 1.05. With 1.05 the hosts were ready to go as soon as the rendering was done. I haven't tried it with an animation yet but I bet it's a big problem. I found a really kludgy work around with Badger where I add a run command that pauses Rhino for 5 seconds before it starts the next rendering, but that's lame. Anyone else having this lag problem on their hosts?

[ANDREW_DECKER]

Does anyone else experience a lag on there render nodes between when a rendering is done and when the nodes are ready to accept another rendering?

[Micha_cg]

I suppose so not so much people are using 1.5 + DR + animation yet. I hope the chaosgroup team found time to check it. I used DR for animations some times in the past, but since I focused the main power to the master machine ... .

Also the update process for the slaves is so cumbersome (I would need it for every nightly build) that I don't use DR with 1.5, only every few weeks for some tests.

So, I think, if you don't get feedback from the community, than it doesn't mean, that it works at other machines.

[renee81]

Funny because I had the exact opposite problem,with 1.05 very often doing animations ,the spawners were not ready to receive .The first frame would work the second no,the third would and so on.

The first animations I did on 1.5 and it was in the beta were done last March ,and I did not have that problem,I had others(like spawners not getting the maps,or unable to get and use the saved light cache etc.) Those problems have been resolved since then,and everything runs smoothly.I don't use any batch renderers.

[k0111]

[QUOTE=ANDREW_DECKER;567839.... Anyone else having this lag problem on their hosts?[/QUOTE]

I do have exactly the same problem here. While batch rendering (with badger 1.0) every second image renders on the master machine only cause the slave machines are busy closing the last job. I did a test run with an animation and it was the same problem there, although, when you use irradiance map and keep that undeleted over the frames, the problem doesn't seem to occur (at least not always, it was only a small test).

[tashko.zashev]

Hi,

Is there an option in Badger (for an example) for delay between the render jobs?
Probably the slaves need some time to refresh if the scene is very complex.

[k0111]

As Andrew already said, there is a workaround with badger. You can trigger a simple rhino-script which causes a pause for some seconds. But f course you can't do that while rendering animations. I tried out simple fly-throughs and fly-arounds with the build-in rhino options (which would be all i need) but in those cases there is no workaround for the problem (and mostly they have more frames to render than a batch would have).

[ANDREW_DECKER]

Hi Tashko,

Thanks for your reply. I have found a solution. In Badger you can hand write in a delay that would be RunScript ( Rhino.Sleep(5000). This will pause Rhino for 5 seconds which seems to be long enough for the slaves to refresh.

I tend to like to hand write a script that I just paste into the command line of Rhino

-Open "\C\directory name\file name"

SetActiveViewPort view name
Render
-SaveRenderWindowAs "\C\directory name\file name.png"
CloseRenderWindow

-RunScript ( Rhino.Sleep(5000) )

[k0111]

-RunScript ( Rhino.Sleep(5000) )

In case you use a localized version of Rhino (like i do) it has to be "-_RunScript " with an underscore.

[fooprobe]

ok, i can confirm that this is a problem running animations with Bongo 2.0 (Rhino 5, Vray 1.5). every other frame renders without the spawners because they are not ready. any bright ideas on how to pause the render between frames using Bongo?

[tashko.zashev]

Hi Fooprobe,

I made a test with Rhino 5 64, Bongo 2.0 beta, the latest V-Ray 1.50.225 and was able to render animations (fifteen frames) with 2 render nodes. The test scene is very simple and i haven't run into issues.

[fooprobe]

Hi Tashko - thanks - I'm experiencing this problem with the same hardware/software, though I was using more slaves. Maybe your slaves were ok because the scene was so simple? they seem to be taking a while to clean up after each frame. I've got a post out to the bongo forum to see if I can pause bongo between frames for a few seconds to let the slaves catch up.

[Zdravko]

If there is no such feature, you can contact Bongo support team directly and request a delay option.

[renee81]

I think the problem here is not Bongo,it is vray spawners that don't release quickly enough.The bigger the drawing the more obvious the problem is.

[mackl]

Hi there,

in RH5 and Vray1.5 + batchrender/ bongo2.x, we have got the same prob. especially with lage textures (arroway) and IES-Files. Every 2nd frame, the spawner of our 44 slaves shows the typical " but currently busy with 0,0,0....All slaves have the same hardware (990x I7 + Win 7 64)

best Marcel