Tile rendering problem

Deadline
1

Hi,

My setup:
Deadline 3.0 SP1
3DS Max 2009 x64
2 workstations
1 repository
2 slaves

I am facing an issue with lighting during tile rendering from the workstations. I have attached the scene files, jobs, and outputs and as you can see in the output, the tiles are rendered differently and do not match each other’s lighting.

Test setup 1:
First & Second workstations send totally different jobs to both slaves to render in tiles.
Result is the tiles rendered with different lighting.

Test Setup 2:
First workstation sends a single job in tiles with limit to only render on the first slave.
Result is same as above.

The funny thing is that this problem used to occur on any one of the tiles 1 in 10 jobs earlier, so we used to just re-render that tile to get it right and ignored it as a major problem.
But now, the problem occurs everytime and the only way to render is to send the job without tiles. But some jobs are huge and just take too much time to render without tiles.

Please help.

Thanks,
Serd.

2

Hi Serd,

For whatever reason, the scenes in the job folders crash max when I try to load them, so I wasn’t able to reproduce this problem. That being said, it is a known problem that you can get different results if pixels from one tile are dependent on pixels from another tile. See this thread for more details:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=287&p=1218&hilit=tile#p1218

Sylvain suggests a possible workaround. If that doesn’t help, the 3dsCmd plugin supports max’s strip rendering, which you could try using as well:
franticfilms.com/software/su … ommand.php

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

I am going to try 3DScmd with split rendering to see what happens.

But, if I still want to use the tile rendering, could you tell me the best practices to minimize the lighting differences so that they are not as prominent. An idea that I am having is to increase the number of tiles to a larger number like have 10 x 10 tiles for a frame of 6400 x 4800.

Thanks for your help.

Regards,
Serd

4

Hi Serd,

With cases like this, it’s more of a trial and error process. It would be interesting if increasing the tile count helps. Also, you can try increasing the pixel padding - this renders additional pixels around the tile, and then crops the tile out.

Cheers,-
Ryan