I strongly doubt that this issue is related to Deadline, but hopefully someone here can shed some light.
When I submit a certain scene to the farm, about 1/2 the machines render the keylight switched off. The keylight is a simple Vray rectangular light with directionality set to 0.65
If I blacklist the machines that rendered with the light off, when they are re-rendered, they render fine.
I have searched high and low for any differences with the machines that won’t render the light. They have the same Vray build, same max, same hardware and same OS.
Any ideas anyone can offer will be gratefully received!
R
If you are using 3dsMax, I would make sure the “restart renderer” checkbox is enabled as this fixes the majority of VRay issues by forcing the VRay renderer to unload and re-load, effectively resetting itself and stopping weird stuff from happening.
I’m pretty sure there is a sanity check in the 3dsMax SMTD interface when submitting directing from 3dsMax that reminds you of this issue if its not been enabled?
Mike
Thanks for the tip Mike.
I can confirm 100% that this has nothing to do with deadline. Opening the file on the renderbox and rendering a frame with a single object and a single light shows that the “bad” machines render the light about 10% of the brightness it should be.
This seems like some sort of units issue but the machines and max installs appear to be identical - including the units setup.
Might be time to contact Chaos Group.
R
Yep, I would check out the VRay forums for any related issues to this.
Even rendering the same Max file using different service packs of VRay can sometimes causes issues I have found.
If you have double-checked athat everything is the same, ie: all Vray identical, All Max identical down to service pack level, then I would consider just deleting the lights and re-creating them after you have merged the major elements of the scene into a fresh session of 3dsMax. This has been known to fix corruptions in the past.
Also, you could always try deleting the “3dsmax.ini” file from the root/user profile of the machine/s which is causing trouble and copy over your 3dsmax.ini, changing any entries which are “username” specific to the username thta is used on your “render machines”.
HTH,
Mike
I have found the cause of the issue but not a solve!
The directionality parameter of the light seems to get halved when the file is opened on certain machines (not all of them).
Deleting and remaking the light does nothing.
I even tried adding a script controller to the directionality param. That didn’t work.
I tried a post-load script with deadline to set the light to the right value, but got a script error “Couldn’t convert 0.8 to string” not sure why it was trying to convert a float value to a string!
the script was:
$VRayLight003.lightDistribution = 0.8
true
R