vray 2.2.03 and slow renders on backburner

Hi Jerome,

I just bought solid rocks and I am noticing that my scene renders really fast locally, but when I use the flythrough wizard and send to backburner all the machines are running really slow compared to rendering locally. Usually the renderfarm machines are pretty similar in performance. I am using sr v 94, and the latest vray build, v 2.2.03. the difference in rendering time is about 26 secs on my machine, and about 15 minutes on the renderfarm. I used your previous “Lite” version of solid rocks before and did not experience this problem. Do I need to install solid rocks on the renderfarm machines as well?

I have tried a few different approaches so far:

1. Use the flythrough wizard to precalculate irradiance map and light cache in one step. Bring up the max render dialog, activate network rendering, close the max render dialog box, then press ‘render animation’ on the flythrough wizard.
2. Same as above, but before I send the job to backburner, I also choose ‘Apply optimizations to scene’ with both lights and materials, and choose ‘Apply SolidRocks settings on exit’, then close solidrocks, then use the max dialog to choose both Light cache and Irradiance maps saved to disk, and use the ‘From file’ mode on both LC and IM. Then send to network.
3. Finally, I created a fresh max file, merged in the objects from the file mentioned above, and tried both above methods on this fresh max file

All methods produce the same super slow renders on the network. I have also noticed an occasional error message in the maxscript listener, I didn’t write it down but it mentioned something about an array index expecting integer but got undefined. I am going to create a thread on the forum for this as well in hopes of reaching you faster.

Also, I am using IM/LC – The default method, with the preset ‘Interior_Vray2’, at the ‘Very Good’ preset, which was working pretty good with the ‘Lite’ version from before.

Another problem I am having is that sometimes when I send a file with the ‘Auto Glossies Subdivs’ and ‘Auto VrayShadows Subdivs’ buttons pressed in the ‘Optimizations’ area of the solidrocks dialog, the job starts and I notice that in the ‘Infos’ section, it shows ‘User’ instead of the actual preset values it normally uses. I stop the job, and the two buttons are no longer blue/active, as if it switched back on its own as soon as the render launched. I was able to get around this in the ‘Lite’ version by unpressing, and then repressing those buttons before sending jobs as a precaution. I do not see the buttons deactivated after sending my jobs currently, but this is not the same version as the ‘Lite’ I was using when seeing this problem before.

Hope you can help, I have a huge deadline and I am in real trouble. These scenes were rendering much faster before, and I can’t figure out what the problem is.

Thanks,
brenticus

***EDIT***
I just recrated the scene from scratch, not using solidrocks, but typing in all the settings manually I recorded from the previous scene, sent to backburner, and it is rendering much faster. I guess this means solidrocks v.994 is not optimized for vray v2.2.03 yet?

**EDIT**
another error message I am getting from solidrocks is 'no "pow" for undefined'
another error message I am getting from solidrocks is 'Incompatible types: 230, and undefined'

responding to your most recent comments:

1. I am referring to activating a network render using backburner after I have used the distributed rendering with the flythru wizard to compute LC and IM. I do typically use the button on the solidrocks window, as opposed to opening the max render dialogue and activating DR via the settings tab.

2. Does solidrocks not apply the changes (glossy and light subdivs optimizations) to the scene if I send it to backburner WITHOUT pressing "Apply Optimizations to scene" before sending? I previously (with the Lite version) did not have to press this button before sending to backburner, and the speed/results were consistent with rendering locally.

looking forward to the send to farm feature, that would be a big improvement.

Thanks for the reply,

Brenticus