Itoo Software Forum

Forest Pack => Forest Pro (*) => Topic started by: joecharon on November 18, 2011, 01:56:02 PM

Title: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: joecharon on November 18, 2011, 01:56:02 PM
Hello,

i have serious problem with distributed rendering when using batch rendering.
Yesterday i have solved problem with missing forest object in buckets rendered
by render nodes. Seems it was caused by "Hide Custom Object before rendering" issue.
First image shows my scene before unchecking this option. After unchecking and
restarting render nodes the scene was rendered fine.
BUT. I wanted to render two views of the scene with Batch render in higher resolution.
They were rendered over night. The first image was rendered fine but the second image
was rendered wrong. Strange thing is that some forest object were rendered fine.
Seems to me like render nodes are not able to adapt to new camera view as fast as needed.
When i came to my office in the morning i have just push render button, no changes to
scene or render nodes and the second image was rendered fine as you can see on the last image.
I use latest Forest Pro 3.6.2 with Max Design 2012 on Win7 64.
3.6.2. version is installed on all my of render nodes.
There are no proxy objects used as Forest custom objects. All objects are meshes.

Jozef
Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: iToo on November 18, 2011, 07:51:02 PM

Both problems have the same cause. Max implements a serie of notifications which are triggered by events in the scene (as modifying the current view or before rendering). It seems that the slaves running on distributed render mode ignore some of these notifications, creating these issues.

Please, tell me if you use Mental Ray or VRay. We will try to isolate the problem and implement a workaround.

Meanwhile, i suggest not to use the "Hide Custom Object..." feature with Distributed Rendering, and to disable the camera clipping when using batch render.

Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: joecharon on November 18, 2011, 09:47:58 PM
Thanks Carlos. I use V-Ray 2.0

Jozef
Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: iToo on November 28, 2011, 07:16:55 PM

A quick update about this issue: we have tried several workarounds, but unfortunately none of them work. Unfortunately it is not possible to use "Camera->Auto assign to active view" together VRay DR from batch mode. It seems that VRay, working on this mode, ignores some Max notifications that we need.

Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: joecharon on November 28, 2011, 08:21:27 PM
Thanks Carlos. Does it work reliably with Backburner?

Jozef
Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: iToo on November 28, 2011, 09:26:53 PM

Yes, we have not detected any problem with Backburner.


Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: simmsimaging on January 10, 2012, 06:23:26 AM
I have been running into this problem now too. I turned off the auto-assign active camera function for all Forest objects (4-5 in this scene) and it is still happening.  Anything else that can be done?

It's occurring repeatedly, but not in the same spots and not always with the same nodes.

running Vray 2.0 - nightly build from Dec 24th.

b
Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: iToo on January 10, 2012, 08:36:26 AM
Quote
I have been running into this problem now too. I turned off the auto-assign active camera function for all Forest objects (4-5 in this scene) and it is
still happening.  Anything else that can be done?

Please, tell me details about your render, to be sure it is the same problem:

Do you use Backburner or Batch Render ?
Are you rendering still images from several cameras or from a single view ?

Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: simmsimaging on January 10, 2012, 08:59:58 AM
Sorry Carlos - I should have read it more carefully. I am not using batch or Backburner in this case. It's just a still render using Vray distributed rendering, from a single camera.

I've had this cropping up numerous times over hte last few days but it seemed to self-correct enough that I could keep moving forward, but now I'm getting closer to needing to render finals so I can't afford to gamble as much on the render succeeding.

/b
Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: iToo on January 10, 2012, 09:32:52 AM
We will investigate this issue. I though it was happenning only with Batch rendering, not with standard renders as well.

It seems the DR nodes don't update correctly the camera change before rendering, but they do at end. So a possible workaround would be to launch the render, stop it inmediately and render again (this is a theory, i have not tried it). Not efficient, but probably it's worth the effort for the final renders, at least while we find a fix.

Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: simmsimaging on January 10, 2012, 09:54:38 AM
Thanks for looking into it. I don't think that solution works though: I have tried repeating a render and it did not solve it, just made the problem buckets move. Perhaps it works sometimes though, as for sure the scene has rendered fine at times. I am not sure at all what triggers it, or stops it.

/b
Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: iToo on January 10, 2012, 09:58:53 AM
Quote
I am not using batch or Backburner in this case. It's just a still render using Vray distributed rendering, from a single camera.

I'm trying to reproduce the problem here. What is your rendering procedure ? Do you assign the camera manually to Forest in the main workstation and then launch the render ?

Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: simmsimaging on January 10, 2012, 10:05:21 AM
The camera was assigned automatically at first. I did not touch that function until I ran into the problem and looked on the forum. There is actually only one camera in the scene though - so perhaps this is an unrelated problem with a similar result?

I think it definitely gets worse as the RAM requirements go up - it's worse when rendering higher res and with a lot of higher res geometry or VrayProxies in use.
Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: iToo on January 10, 2012, 10:09:38 AM
Yes, i think this is a different issue. The camera should not be a problem if it doesn't change and auto-view is off.

Perhaps VRay is not loading the proxies correctly. What is your exact VRay version ? I know ChaosGroup has released multiple releases in the last days to solve some problems.

Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: simmsimaging on January 10, 2012, 06:05:08 PM
I am using 2.25.01

I don't think it's just proxies though: the problem was occurring with geometry as well. I just switched to using proxies because the max file was over 3GB and was taking forever to open/save :)

/b
Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: iToo on January 10, 2012, 07:57:06 PM

I suggest you try using the latest VRay stable release (2.20.02). Forest has not been tested with 2.25, and it would generate unpredictable results.

Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: simmsimaging on January 10, 2012, 07:58:09 PM
Ok. Thanks.

b
Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: simmsimaging on January 11, 2012, 09:52:52 AM
I'm having another issue cropping up with DR - might be related. See the screen grab:

(https://www.evernote.com/shard/s2/sh/98cf3caf-ccfb-4c58-bebc-65662ac8ad14/1cacdd222dc0edc82992554d6be580dc/res/b3623718-5ae1-4278-8aec-52b87585b898/ScreenClip.png)

Renders are stalling out and individual machines are showing up with dozens of buckets locked up - but there are more buckets showing than cores. This hasn't happened before with Vray. If I go to the node and shutdown the vrayspawner then the main workstation will pick up those buckets and render them.

I installed the stable build listed on the nightly downloads as the latest (2.2.01) and it did not help. I am not sure if it will help the other problem of missing or misplaced sections - I'm now getting this problem instead :)  The machines that show this problem have varied - I am using 4 nodes and each has done this at least once.

Any thoughts?

/b
Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: iToo on January 11, 2012, 10:22:12 AM

I'm sorry, but i have not idea what may be the problem ???. It seems a VRay issue, because Forest has little effect on the render engine, once it creates the instances and render starts.

Please, post this case in the ChaosGroup forum. Probably they have more information about similar problems. I will follow your post, in case they need assistance by our side.

Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: simmsimaging on January 12, 2012, 02:23:39 AM
I am zeroing in on it, but it's slow going.

I can pinpoint the problem (for now, in this one scene at least) to one of my forest objects and PSD Manager. If I turn of either one it works, but if both are active it creates this problem.

I am going to merge to a new scene to see if I can narrow it down further, but one problem I noticed: when you delete a forest object it still leaves all it's template versions in the max file.  As I had many large meshes the file is bloated as a result, and because the FPP library assigns a random name it's very hard to figure out which is which to manually delete them.

Can you make it so that the meshes get deleted when the FP object is removed, or if different geometry is assigned to it?

Thanks /b
Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: iToo on January 12, 2012, 10:11:58 AM

We remove periodically the unused meshes from the scene, e.g. when adding new items to the Geometry List, but i'm not sure if we do it when the Forest object is deleted.

We will check the code and fix it if needed.

Title: Re: Distributed rendering problem
Post by: iToo on January 31, 2012, 09:09:34 AM

Update: this problem was finally solved by the PSD-Manager developer. It was caused by a conflict of versions of the PSD-Manager. It was not related to Forest Pack Pro:

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbulletin/showthread.php?66841-new-issue-with-DR&p=540088#post540088 (http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbulletin/showthread.php?66841-new-issue-with-DR&p=540088#post540088)