Distributed rendering - Connection failed

[thatmilkman]

I've found a pretty strange bug and would like to bring it to light as we have been struggling with this for quite a while and found a "fix" for it today.

This is extremely hard to explain so i will refer to screengrabs with annotations.

We have a scene where the (view to render (in the render settings) is locked to the main camera. Yet when we open max is displays as (Perspective) and the active viewport is perspective view. When we hit render, it will in fact render the correct camera though. (see image_01).

Now...if i hit render using DR rendering the renders will attempt to start but then loop into "connection failed". (image_02)

The "Fix". If i uncheck (view to render (in the render settings), display the correct camera view in the viewport and then hit render, it will work perfectly.(image_04)

I suspect it has something to do with the post.ms script, as when i came across this forum post (https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=15516.0) i tried the solution from there and it worked, so this led me to believe there is something definitely going on with the viewport/camera connection. (image_03)

Corona version:

Corona version: 3 (Hotfix 1)
Full-speed, Non-debug, MaxSDK 2018
Build timestamp: Dec 17 2018 14:47:55
Defines: Wide RGB

3ds max version:

2018.4 Update

[rowmanns]

Hi,

Thank you for reporting this, are you able to send your scene over to me?

Instructions on how to do this are in my signiture.

Thanks,

Rowan

[thatmilkman]

Hi,

Uploading now via dropbox from the link in your signature.

Please let me know if you receive it.

Thanks.

[rowmanns]

Hi,

Thanks, can you confirm the name of the file uploaded?

Cheers,

Rowan

[thatmilkman]

It would be DR_BugReport.zip

[rowmanns]

Hi,

Thanks, I wanted to make sure I had the right one.

I will investigate this and I will do my best to keep you updated on the progress.

Cheers,

Rowan

(Internal ID=345673796)

[thatmilkman]

Awesome sounds good.

Just remember to replicate the error, as soon as you open the file, dont change viewports, just check the render settings etc and render.

Look forward to hearing what you find.

[rowmanns]

Hi,

So I have done some testing this afternoon with v4 (daily build) and v3 HF2.

I can reproduce the error with the connection failing. But as you mentioned above in the linked topic it's stated that DR should only be used with cameras, so I guess something like this can be expected.

When I change the view from perspective to the correct camera and update it in the render setup everything works fine. If I now re-save the file the camera view will now be respected upon loading the scene.

So it looks to me like the view has not been correctly saved at one point.. Can you confirm to me that if you re-save the scene with the view and render setup changed to the correct camera it now works even after loading the scene again?

Thanks,

Rowan

[thatmilkman]

Hi,

Thats great thanks for taking a look into this.

Yes i can agree that when you save the scene with the correct camera in view it'll work fine. Again, this was a colleague of mine who was working in this way and i suspect there are other people out there who would do that same (possibly). Our company has spent a few thousand pounds on network specialists coming in to try solve the issue with no resolution until what i found and what you saw today.

Do you think it would be worth in future builds to display an error for something like this? along the lines of "not using camera view" or something like that, to better help pin point the issue.

Thanks again for your help.

[rowmanns]

Hi,

I'm glad it's now working when it is re-saved.

I agree that there should be a more descriptive error message, I'll log a request for this and speak to our dev team about it.

Thanks,

Rowan