C4D VRay Glossy Reflections and Black frames

Deadline
1

Let me say upfront that I’m not convinced this is a Deadline issue but I’m reaching out in desperation. We’re tying to render about 300 frames from Cinema 4D using V-Ray. When we turn on Glossy Reflections (desired for the specific content we’re dealing with) each node will immediately write a black frame for each frame in the total job (so about 300 black frames). These frames continuously get re-written so when a final, rendered frame does come out it is almost immediately written over by a black frame. This does not happen if I open the project and render locally on a node. We also have Local Rendering turned on so technically nothing should be written back to our shared storage until the frames are complete.

Really banging our heads against the wall here. Hopefully someone has run into this sort of thing before.

Thanks.
Vaughn

2

Hi
When you render it locally, do you render in the gui or from the terminal with the render arguments from Deadline?

Cheers
Bonsak

3

So, there are two problems here?

  1. C4D + VRay is rendering black frames
  2. Those black frames are rendering over top of good frames somehow.

The only times I see #2 happen is when it’s Maya and it’s doing frame renumbering (each task writes over another task), or when the output location for one job is the same as another. Can you explain why they continually get re-rendered?

For #1, as Bonsak says, we should try and get it running via the command line using the command line arguments from the render log files. I know that Cinema 4D itself doesn’t like to do GI stuff on farms, but I think VRay should handle things just fine.

4

Thanks for the replies. We got around the issue and just found that it was probably a bug in VRay 1.8.1.58. The 1.8.1.59 change log mentiones black frames being written erroneously.

V

5

Thanks for keeping us posted.