CGTalk - maya 8 sat rendering breaking

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alexx

10-05-2006, 08:17 AM

hey,

i am having some real trouble with the mental ray satellite rendering from the command line.
in my current scene the rendering breaks after some 10-20 frames with the message:

"SLAVE x DIED"

where x is more or less random.

anyone else with that problem or even better: a solution? :)

cheers

alex

llikethat

10-05-2006, 02:36 PM

This happens when the slave is disconnected from the network.

1. Either by restarting the machine.
2. Shutdown.
3. Network Error.

There cannot be any other reason for this error to occur.

alexx

10-05-2006, 02:41 PM

just one minute ago i was sitting in front of the computer with my sys-admin.

we had the network properties window open, when the rendering crashed.

i am sure most wont believe that:
we both (!) saw, as in the very same moment the rendering crashed windows started the firewall (which is switched off usually and by default) and then stopped the firewall again some 5 seconds later!

i can not believe this.

current test with double deactivated firewall is working well now.. incredible. if that really was/is the problem i am thinking about a trip to redmond....

cheers

alex

awnold

10-12-2006, 03:57 PM

are you saying satellite actually works with maya 8? =)

alexx

10-12-2006, 04:05 PM

hehe naja.. partially :)

we finally seem to have found the real problem:
the driver for the network card had a bug that made it crash from time to time, when CPU usage was very high. with mental rendering it was always 100% - so good by :)

for me the sat rendering now works when i am rendering from the command line.
in the GUI i did not succeed, since as soon as i change shaders or something else the slave machines do not render anymore.

but i am happy with the first time sat rendering is running - no matter how :)

cheers

alex

awnold

10-12-2006, 04:30 PM

Alexx, these issues:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=287312&page=2&pp=15

are they resolved?

and are they resolved for maya 7 (have not upgraded yet.) Thanks!

"It's definatly a bug. The satellite only renders the last percent of fg and the last percent of the frame. The rest of the time it idles. And my render time is about 2 hours, so network speed is not the problem. I watched the network traffic, and it crawls along with 20 kbyte/s, only when doing that last percent it jumps to 10 mbyte/s.
I guess it's not a problem with the satellite client, but in maya itself, not distributing the jobs properly.
If I render with the rendernomaster (RNM/rnm) flag it instantly uses the slave at 100 percent processor speed.
But I need to use both master and slave, and maya just doesn't want to"

"it is a confirmed bug from alias :/

cheers

alex"

alexx

10-12-2006, 04:46 PM

weeeellll :)

it´s better but not perfect to be honest.
depending on the scene the slaves still idle around a lot.

scenes with very high render times work best.
rendering a simple sphere with low aa settings will still result in only the master rendering.
in regular scenes a lot of the job is on the master but the slaves do more than in 7.0 at least

so: better but way to go for autodesk/mental images

cheers

alex

p.s.: that is in maya 8. nothing is fixed in 7.x

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