Have you tried enabling the “Restart renderer between frames” option when submitting the job? Bob had mentioned this had worked for him earlier in this thread. If that doesn’t help, can you post a simple scene that reproduces the problem?
Cheers,
We’re noticing this too. RE are rendering with the correct alpha, but the rgb is pure black? Seemed to happening randomly on different frames, but after turning on “Restart render between frames” they all seem to be black now? We have the vray frame buffer turned off also and were just getting black RE’s with corect alpha?
Fred
Can someone PLEASE post a simple scene that reproduces this! 
That would really help us diagnose this problem. We use VRay and its REs all the time here, and we don’t have this problem, so I’m assuming we’re overlooking something. Maybe let us know which version of 3dsmax/Vray as well, as well as the Deadline version.
In the case where it’s happening randomly, check to see if it’s a particular slave that is rendering these black frames. You can see which slave rendered each task in the Task List in the Monitor.
Thanks!
Ryan,
We’re using RPManager here also so it’s hard to know if this is a deadline issue or not. (it seems like it since others are getting the problem too) I’d post a file, but my boss would freak out if i sent the characters were working on out of house. I’ll try to create a simple scene example.
Fred
Ryan,
Here’s one of my files where all the RE’s come out black. There is nothing special about it, but again, we’re using rpmanager v2.08. It seems like it’s happening with vray and the scanline renderer.
Fred
AJ_4_2010_RE_test.zip (1.79 MB)
Thanks. We were able to reproduce the problem, so we’ll see if we can figure out what’s going on.
Cheers,
Great to hear Ryan, Good luck with it.
One of my TD’s reported that if “Use real pixel RGB data” was unchecked in the .exr settings, he got more RE’s out of his sequence than before, but many frames will still missing. (Could be completely unrelated)
let us know if you find a workaround.
Fred
Ryan,
Has there been any progress on why Render Elements are comming out black? last i heard you were able to reproduce it? We sort of rely on them and Im not sure what to do when we need to get depth passes out for this next job. Rendering on one machine is a work around, but it’s killing us.
Fred
Hi Fred,
No progress yet, though I can assure you that this issue is still near the top of our priority list.
As a workaround, could you try rendering with the 3ds Command plugin? It uses 3dsmax’s command line renderer to do the rendering, and others have used it to workaround specific max problems until we get them resolved in the main 3dsmax plugin.
software.primefocusworld.com/sof … ommand.php
We’ll let you know as soon as we figure out the problem.
Cheers,
Hey Fred,
Have you tried unchecking the vrayVFB checkbox for the parameters for each of the render elements? We just tried that here and it resulted in non-black frames. Let us know if that helps!
Cheers,
Ryan,
I just tried to submit through the regular deadline 3.1 script (instead of rpmanager) and the depth channel came out perfect! Im confused to the difference between that script and and 3ds command plugin your refering to?
So now im thinking its something in the rpmanager that might be screwing up? I’ll try turning off the vray option in the render elements and submitting again through RPManager interface (I cant live without that thing!)
Fred
The Deadline 3.1 script submits to our 3dsmax plugin (which uses lightning.dlx, a custom built plugin that max loads and uses to communicate with Deadline), while the 3ds Command script submits to the 3dsCmd plugin (which just uses the 3dsmax command line renderer, 3dsmaxcmd.exe). Here’s some additional info:
software.primefocusworld.com/sof … andfaq.php
Let us know how your tests go!
Cheers,
Ryan,
When you reproduced this problem, did you uses RPManager to submit? i just used the deadline script (plugin version) without RPManager and the elements seem to be comming out ok?
Fred
Hey Fred,
Sorry for the delay. I was out of the office last week. I wasn’t using RPManager when I reproduced this problem, but I was using the test scene you had posted earlier. So maybe RPM had something to do with that vrayVFB option being checked, and since the test scene already had that option stored, I was getting the results you described.
Cheers,
So are we in agreement that the vrayVFB checkbox in the render elements section is the culprit for not getting the render elements saved out properly?
Fred
I believe so. We’ll be sure to update our 3dsmax FAQ to mention this.
Cheers,
Ryan, just to add to the issue, i turned that option off and was rendering sets of 10 frames on the farm and only the first render element is right. The other 9 for each machine are black. Im trying again with restart renderer between tasks turned on and with only 1 frame per machine.
I hate this. Render elements are supposed to allow us to not render again, and instead i find myself rendering the same damn sequence 5 times before I get it right. I hope you guys can just get this to work the same as it does when i render locally. its a real pain in the ass.
Fred
Hi Fred,
I’m sorry to hear you’re having so many problems. I should note though that when VRay is the selected renderer, and the Restart Renderer is disabled, the sanity check will warn the submitter about this. Are you guys using the sanity checker when submitting jobs? If not, that might be a good place to start. That being said, did enabling Restart Renderer actually help this particular situation?
I’ll talk to one of our L&R guys today to see what settings they’re using to achieve proper RE results when rendering with VRay. Also, since disabling the vrayVFB RE option seems to be the solution, we’ll see if we can disable these settings automatically during submission, and re-enable them afterwards (like we do with the main Enable Built-In Frame Buffer) option.
Cheers,
Doing this is actually pretty straightforward, so we’ll include this in the next release.
Cheers,
He said the only option they rely on is the Restart Renderer Between Frames option. It has come to our attention though that this option is not sticky by default, so we’ll change this in the next release. To make it sticky, you’ll want to toggle the RestartMax setting in \your\repository\submission\3dsmax\SubmitMaxToDeadline_StickySettings.ini so that it looks like:
RestartMax=trueCheers,