Heya Folks!
I’m trying to get vray 3’s dbr to behave and one of the issues seems to be that deadline is forcing port 20212 on all of the slaves whereas vray 3 is now using 20204 - there aren’t any port config options in the configure plugins section for vray dbr in the deadline monitor, is there a config elsewhere where we can edit or specify port ranges? Using old fashioned DR and specifying the correct port works fine, it’s just deadline at the minute using the correct ip but specifying a wrong port.
Cheers!
John
Hi John,
I don’t believe there is a way to control the port number used for “VRay for 3dsMax”. Do tell me if this is possible!
We do expose the port Number for Softimage as it’s different (XSI 20207 port vs. Standalone 20204 port) and it is possible to control the Maya one as well, but we have left this to studios to configure as they prefer. In terms of Deadline & VRay DR for 3dsMax, we just starts up the vrayspawner.exe and we don’t force the port number. Perhaps something else is already running on port 20204 and so it finds the next available port? (TCP: 20204 is used by VRay Standalone. Are you using that somewhere else in your studio and you have a conflict?)
re: docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY … ortNumbers
Could you explain what you mean/steps to re-produce by: “Using old fashioned DR and specifying the correct port works fine”?
So!
If I go on to a render node and run the max 2014 vray 3 spawner, then use netstat -a to see what ports open up, I get 20204 as specified in the vray 3 help. If I manually enable dr in vray and go to the settings button in the render dialog, I get the option of add and edit server, and in that floating window I can specify a port range for the machines to look for a connection. This is defaulting to 20212 for me. I’ve got max 2012 with vray 2.4x installed and under max 2014 (which is the version I use day to day) I have vray 3 installed. When I start up distributed rendering via deadline, It’ll connect to a number of machines but when I actually start rendering, they’ll all try to use port 20212 which will fail. I’ll talk to the vray guys too and see if they can offer any advice about where this default 20212 might be coming from and if we can edit it.
Cheers!
John
EDIT:
We’re not touching standalone at all and it seems that vray 3 is using 20204 for DR and not the standalone:
docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY … ortNumbers
Ah, I think I might know what’s going on here…
Depending on the version of VRay / VRay Spawner used, it previously (Max2012-2014) used port: 20212, but the newer VRay versions use port: 20204.
You can see this by opening up the “vray_dr.cfg” files such as the one I have locally for Max 2012, 2014, 2015, the port number changes in max 2015.
“C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2015\en-US\plugcfg\vray_dr.cfg”
So, as long as your running the correct version of “VRaySpawner.exe” to match the correct version of VRay --> 3dsMax version, then the ports should match.
I believe the port which VRaySpawner.exe uses is however, hard-coded into the application unlike VRay Standalone which is effectively what XSI & Maya use.
Hmm.
What’s odd is that deadline’s correctly set the paths for each version of the vray spawner and it’s pulling the version from 2014 correctly. What’s happening though is when I hit reserve servers, it’s adding in all the machines with port 20212 if I check either the vray render log or if I open the distributed rendering settings from the vray render dialog. I’m not getting any machines (either my workstation or the nodes) generating a vray_dr.cfg either - would it be vray or deadline that’d normally be writing this file?
The “vray_dr.cfg” file will be written normally by VRay to your plugcfg directory. You can confirm where that is in a particular version of 3dsMax by executing this maxscript command.
GetDir #plugcfg
If after using VRay DR ‘manually’ that file is not there, then there is a deeper underlying VRay issue here.
Typically, VRay will be reading/writing to this cfg file. However, if your using our in-app DR submission app, then we read in and write out to, so that we can update the machine names/ip addresses as slaves become active with running the vrayspawner application. However, I just checked the code and we don’t explicitly write the port number, so 20212 is the default, which has changed in VRay v3 to 20204.
Do you have 20212 open on your firewall as well as 20204? I believe you need a range of these port numbers for everything to work smoothly. (20204, 20205, 20206 - VRay v3). I think Chaos Group would be best to advise on the older port numbers required.
Right - thanks for the hint on the cfg directory. There seems to be something a tiny bit screwy going on over at my side - Vlado seems to think that 20212 is the new vray port for 3.x but the docs and the spawner itself running say 20204. Either way he’s come up with some very handy info:
Hi John,
Thanks for the info. However, in my tests I’ve been unable to get the “-port XXXXX” flag to work with any version of VRay or 3dsMax using the “vrayspawner.exe”. Are you sure this is possible?
It works fine for the VRay slave/spawner in Maya or Softimage but I don’t believe this is possible in 3dsMax?
Yeah looking that way on my side too, I definitely can’t get it to behave using the configure plugins section for the path to the exe. The environmental variable is working fine thankfully so I’ve set all the machines to 20212, I’ve let Vlado know about the command line switch not behaving and see if he’s finding the same thing. I suspect something fishy happening with DR ports…
Thanks John. At least the sys env variable works for you for now 
Let me know if Vlado has any useful info!