Has anyone bumped into this issue, or is it just me doing something wrong, again?
The issue: Rendering in Max 2014 with VRay 3.00.03 a really, really simple scene (attached) Test.zip (9.66 MB)
with many Render Elements. When I submit the scene, the very first frame is being rendered and saved correctly, but consequent frames, except for the BEAUTY pass (the main render), are all black.
When rendered locally, everything is OK, of course, only when rendering via Deadline do I get the second and onwards frames black.
Hi,
Typically, this is VRay needing to be restarted, which we can do via the “Restart Renderer Between Frames” checkbox in SMTD or in an existing job in the Deadline queue via monitor, you can right-click, modify properties and the setting under “Render Options” -> “Restart Renderer Between Frames” -> set this to True. Additionally, this setting is also available in the monitor submission UI in the 2nd tab as well. So, with Lightning, we use the SDK to un-load the VRay plugins, thereby causing it to purge any memory it has locked onto and then re-load the VRay plugins. The impact on overall render time is so small, it’s not worth worrying about, as it’s ~1 sec. The flip side, is we hold onto less memory than if you were rendering consecutive frames on your local machine, which is useful, if you’re getting close to the machine’s actual physical capabilities.
Hope this helps!
Mike
Wow, so, all in all, the Restart Renderer option should really be always turned to True? If it makes such an insignificant render time delay? That is sweet!
Yep, it’s a super useful feature, unique to Deadline. The one caveat is don’t have this enabled if you are sending LC/IM caching map type jobs to the farm, as VRay will get reset for each frame and the LC/IM files won’t get incrementally increased with the additional data per frame. In fact, I’ll go ahead and add this to the 3dsmax manual as it’s important info!
