new issue with DR?

[simmsimaging]

This started up in the last few days, and at first I thought it was due to using Forest Pack Pro, but the guys at FPP seem to think it's Vray related. See the screen cap below:



You can see some of the nodes are showing dozens of buckets, but they all just hang there indefinitely. I can kill the node and the workstation or functioning nodes will pick up those buckets. The nodes doing this vary from render to render.

This was done with the stable build from the nightlies, and also with the newest build just to verify it wasn't just the nightly.

Any ideas?

Thanks /b

[vlado]

Yes, I've seen this; it used to happen in some particular circumstances. I thought we'd fixed those but apparently not Do you think you can get me a scene where I can reproduce this relatively easily?

Best regards,
Vlado

[simmsimaging]

THanks for getting back to me Vlado. Do you have Forest Pack Pro there? My current scene is doing this for sure but it's loaded up with FPP objects.

b

[vlado]

Yes, the guys at Itoo were kind to give me a license.

Best regards,
Vlado

[simmsimaging]

I am not surprised - their support is (almost) as good as yours

I will send you the complete scene to make it easy. tks!

[simmsimaging]

Hey Vlado -
I think this might be related to PSD Manager actually. I had forgotten about that being active. I tested it without that activated and it seems to render okay. The problem can be reproduced by turning PSDM off and on, at least in this file. I'll get in touch with Daniel.

/b

[dans]

I'm looking into it. Brett is running a non-public Beta version of psd-manager.

Daniel

[simmsimaging]

Yes, sorry - should have been more specific. I'm actually running a beta of PSDM, Forest (public) and Vray. Not terribly surprising that things are a bit iffy However, I have rolled back Vray to the stable release to remove that from the equation. At current I have narrowed it down to at least one FP object and PSDM in combination. Still trying to see if it's a specific mesh or material that might be doing it.

b

[dans]

So far we narrowed it down to an issue related to using V-Ray 2.2, psd-manager 3 and Forrest Pack Pro 3.7.7 (also 3.6.2) together.

When rendering with V-Ray 2.20.01 Distributed Rendering slaves hang (are not finishing the bucket) when all of the following applies:
- V-Ray Framebuffer is enabled
- V-Ray Distributed Rendering is used
- a Forrest Pack Pro object is used (e.g. a few simple spheres scattered)
- multi-layer G-Buffer is created by VRay (e.g. just the Object-ID channel alone)
- multi-layer G-Buffer is read by psd-manager


The slaves doing this seem to be random as are the buckets showing this behaviour.

Waiting for some feedback/test version from Itoosoft so I can try to reproduce it.

Best Regards,
Daniel Schmidt

[Itoosoft]

Hi all,

I just sent a Forest Pro license to Daniel, so he can test the scene. I hope together we can solve this problem !

Brett, if you are using them, please remove Forest Material and Forest Color from the test scene, and tell us the result. To difference of the geometry generator, these plugins are by called the VRay engine while rendering.

[simmsimaging]

Thanks Carlos!
I did run some tests using the material override with a default Vray material to see if that helped and it made no difference.

[Itoosoft]

Thanks Carlos!
I did run some tests using the material override with a default Vray material to see if that helped and it made no difference.

Ok, then we must wait the test results from Daniel.

[simmsimaging]

I think there may be something more going on now... Last night I fired up a render test before going to bed - FPP active, and PSDM active, but with the GBuffer turned off in PSDM. This morning the render was stuck with a very similar looking problem - many buckets stalled out for two of the nodes, but this time the other two nodes and the workstation had stopped rendering. The render dialog was flashing "unloading geometry" and rendering back and forth, but there were no visible buckets for the active machines. Screen cap below.

[simmsimaging]

Quick addendum: The buckets that were rendered in the image above were done by the workstation and node r2. My other node was not actually involved. I have restarted the render with PSDM de-activated and it appears to be going just fine.

/b

[dans]

Problem solved, it was caused by different versions of the psd-manager (Beta) being installed at the same time on the DR servers. It was not related to Forrest Pack Pro.

Daniel