Hi,



We’ve been using deadline for about 6 or 7 months now and have had good success with it. However, lately we’ve run into a small problem that is causing some headaches in production. We’re running Vray 1.47.03 for all our renderings on 3ds max 8 (currently SP1). Some of the scenes we are submitting are rather large and use up large amounts of RAM. Our farm is composed of a mix of 32 and 64 bit machines (we’re working towards removing the 32 bit ones) The problem we’ve got is that every once in a while, Vray will not finish rendering a scene and we’ll see the file saved with some of the render blocks saved. The amount of the frame finished will vary greatly from missing only one or two blocks to still processing GI.



Mostly this appears to happen with the machine reaches it’s memory limits. Anyway, to make a long story short, Deadline is marking these incomplete frames as complete, which means we have to manually check each frame sequence to verify completeness. Is this a known issue in deadline or is this a Vray problem?



Mostly this seams to occur on the 32 bit systems, but every once in a while it will happen on a 64 bit machine. And the same machine will do this on one frame and render several more complete without any problems. So the problem is rather inconsistent other than it mostly happens with scenes that use 1.5 GB of RAM to render or in rare cases a bit more than that.



We’re running the latest build of Deadline along with the plugin fix that allows the Vray Frame Buffer to work properly.



I’ll probably post a similar question on the vray forums and see what comes up there. This problem won’t stop us from using Deadline, but just causes some extra headaches that I would rather avoid. So if you have any hints or suggestions, I would appreciate it.



Thanks





Todd Peterson

Production Manager

3Plains

Hey Todd, I’ve seen this behavior from VRay in the past. When I last saw this, even though the VRay renderer stopped rendering the frame, for some reason Max will exit without reporting an error, and so the network rendering software will mark the frame complete.



I suspect yours is a similar issue, so speaking with the VRay folks is a good idea.

James,



Thanks. I kind of figured it was a vray issue, but wanted to make sure before I brought it up with them.



Todd