reflection/shading problem with DR

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max Issues
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1

hi all!

I made a thread about this problem before The Great Forum Disaster, but since I’ve been on holidays - belileve it or not - without internet access, I wasn’t able to see if there were any answers. And now since the old thread is gone, I decided to repost it.

So - here it is again.

I’ve been having issues with how reflections/shading is calculated with DR enabled.
Scene is pretty simple - one object, no GI, HDRi in reflection slot, a few vraylights, physcam, nothing fancy. When rendering locally everything is OK. But if using DR there are strage atifacts, buckets from slaves are generally brighter and the reflections’/shading look different.

here are some examples:


shading/reflections?


very visible/very annoying/ DR buckets are bighter


more subtle, but still…

…and since it’s an animation, the flickering is so horrible it ruins the whole thing. Of course
I can render it locally, but it will take ages - originally it’s in HD, about 2000 frames, some over 20 minutes to render. With DR they take less than 4 minutes, but You can see what happens…

I checked the HDRi - it’s identical on all slaves (maps are stored locally on all slaves),
here’s what I did to try to avoid the problem:

disabled mblur - nothing
disabled hdri reflection - nothing
tweked the settings a bit (noise thresh and such) - nothing, but it seems to be slightly less visible with noise threshold below 0.01
checked the geometry for any overlapping faces - all is OK
disabled 2-sided material - nothing

If anyone has any idea what’s wrong - please, let me know. I’m on a tight schedule with this job, and really need help…

the setup:
xp/32b
max9/32b
vray 1.5 sp2
one workstation and two dual slaves.

cheers!

Maciej

2

It might help to re-install V-Ray SP2 on the render slaves.

Best regards,
Vlado

3

thanks Vlado, sadly it didn’t help.
uninstall went smoothly, no files left behind (apart from vraydrspawner.exe, which I deleted manually).

turned off all the lights - no effect.
disabled reflections (again) - nothing.

the file is about 3.5 megs zipped, so I can e-mail it to You if You have time to look into it.

4

update:

I uploaded the file here:

http://www.speedyshare.com/495967174.html

password is 3373310502100
it was packed with winrar, so there can be some issues with built-in packers (like the one in totalcommander) - but it works fine with winrar.

5

Does this actually happen with other scenes? If yes, you can email me to vlado@chaosgroup.com and we’ll sort it out.

Best regards,
Vlado

6

the file is uploaded, You can find the link in my previous post.

this happened to me for the first time, with all the scenes in this particular project. i don’t recall this happening earlier. the only thing different in theese scenes is the object being shown - light setup, maps, settings are the same.

update: i disabled the map that is in the diffuse slot - still nothing…
update2: ward seems to generate least artifacts, while blinn and phong are equally ugly

7

In that case, please email me to vlado@chaosgroup.com; in any case I don’t think the issue is related to the particular scene or project.

Best regards,
Vlado

8

e-mail sent, thanks Vlado