Hi,
Just discovered that using 3dsMax + VRay, the “Generate Preview” button under the VRay Frame Buffer Settings MUST be turned OFF for network rendering!
The “Generate Preview” button is documented here:
spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/vfb_index.html
I was a little bit surprised that nobody seems to have identified this issue already?!! VraySilentMode Enable - Does seem to be working?..!!!
Am I missing something?
Thanks,
Mike
EDIT: Here’s the MAXScript code for it:
vr=renderers.current
vr.output_genpreview = false
UPDATE:
I think the pop-up “render histroy settings” is not the 3dsMax one but the VRAY hidden feature which is described in this post here:
vray.info/topics/t0123.asp
We don’t have this feature enabled on any of our systems, but I think under network render mode and “generate preview” turned ON, this causes this pop-up top appear and refresh very regularly!
This pop-up also causes a lot of STDOUT, which again, maybe causing the slaves to de-stabilise and run out of virtual memory
Looking at the other forum posts, looks like the deadline code to automatically disable the VRay frame buffer needs to be enhanced to support turning off the “generate preview” checkbox if its turned ON?
Still not entirely sure why the VRay frame buffer has been disabled and also would explain why the “VRay:: Frame Buffer” settings are missing from the 3dsmax job properties tab in the queue.
Hey Mike,
Can you send us a test scene with the necessary vray settings already set so that the scene is in an unrenderable state? We can’t seem to reproduce any errors here, and the preview option seems to work fine.
The popup handling is normal for when that popup is displayed (not sure why it would be with silent mode enabled), and as far as we know, it shouldn’t really affect performance or memory usage (we have this pop up occasionally for us too).
Cheers,
Earlier today, I put a sanity check in place to ensure the “generate preview” checkbox is disabled before submission. There’s no need to have this additional overhead during network processing, especially as the VRay frame buffer is turned OFF automatically. The couple of 3dsMax scene files in question displaying this problem have been re-worked today as their previous frame time was too high > 4hrs+. Rumour has it that VRay had got its ‘knickers in a twist’, with regard what geometry was hidden or visible to the renderer at various stages of the camera move in the scene files, which was causing memory levels to go through the roof. These files are processing tonight, so should see have some more results in the morning. I’m going to cross-reference the render results/log/error reports with RAM amount installed in the nodes as I’m pretty sure the problem occurs more often when a machine gets very close to the physical limit of RAM installed. Not sure if I’m going to be able to send any test files due to NDA restrictions but I’ll see what I can do tomorrow.
I think this particular situation would benefit greatly from Deadline having a “Job - Max. Memory Limit” function, but I’m pretty sure we have spoken about this before…
Mike
Update:
All last night’s files processed OK. The sanity check seems to have resolved this issue for us or maybe re-engineering the files helped?
Peak RAM is looking a lot better at 1-1.2GB now.
Another run of render passes are in the queue tonight, so we’ll see if anything happens overnight again…
+1 vote for a “Max Memory Limit” feature in Deadline v4.1 tho 
Its the only case I can think of that guaranteed, always causes every slave to lock up and not be able to auto-recover, requiring a physical re-boot which is bad 
Mike
We won’t be able to get this in to 4.1, but we can definitely take a look at it for the following release.
Cheers,
