Mental Ray GI and Final Gather caching

Deadline
1

One of our artists is submitting a job to our render farm and wants to cache the global illumination and final gather to speed up rendering.
If he submits a job with just one frame it works if he renders the cache locally, if the cache is not prepared by the workstation it wont render the single frame job properly. it appears as though the quality is degraded tremendously on the final gather when the farm renders it. The GI just doesn’t render at all.

If an image sequence is submitted the frames return with no GI map used and the final gather quality is degraded (if its even doing this)

any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

2

What software are you rendering with (Max, Maya, etc)?

Is the GI cached being saved to a network location? The slaves will need access to the cached data, and if that is saved locally on the workstation that the job is being submitted from, that could explain why the GI doesn’t get rendered by the slaves.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

We are rendering with Max 2012

GI is saved to a network path that the render nodes and repository have access to.

thanks

4

Thanks for checking that!

Could you try loading the scene file in Max on a render node to see if it can read the GI cache? Deadline doesn’t control how Max reads in cached data, so I can’t think of anything Deadline would be doing to prevent it from doing so…

Cheers,

  • Ryan
5

max is not licensed on the render nodes, its render engine only.

Is there a process to load this through a command line or anything?

thanks

6

Hi,
If 3dsMax has never been booted up on one of your render nodes, it will default into 30 day demo eval mode, thereby allowing you to get “workstation mode” up to debug this issue.
HTH,
Mike

7

You could try rendering it via the command line using 3dsmaxcmd.exe (which can be found in the root of the 3dsmax install folder). This will render the full sequence:

3dsmaxcmd.exe "path\to\scene.max"

This will render the specified range:

3dsmaxcmd.exe  -start:1 -end:5 "path\to\scene.max"

Cheers,

  • Ryan