[SOLVED] Animation rendering dark in render farm after Corona 12HF1 update

[Julieta]

Dear Corona team,

We are having issues with a project of ours. Locally it renders fine, but when we send it to our render farm the visuals are dark (although you can see that it's not 100% black, there's light information in there)
We've searched the forum to see if there could be anyone else with this strange issue, but we couldn't find anything.
We've deleted mental ray legacy assets, we've cleaned the scene with Corona Power tools and Prune Scene but nothing seems to work.
I attach a picture of how it's looking vs how it's supposed to look.
We have an urgent deadline and we are driving ourselves crazy trying to figure it out. Would you please help us with this?

USEFUL INFO:
Corona 12 HF1
3DS max 2025
Color management: Gamma Workflow 2.2
Rendered in our farm using Pulze Render Manager 2.2.15
Set Ups through Pulze Scene Manager 2.5.10 (BETA)

Kind regards :)

[maru]

Are you using Corona DR here? It looks like one of the nodes did not render the image at all (black screen) but another one rendered it and the results were merged. This can happen when using DR. The fix would be making sure that the node can access all the assets.

How many nodes are used in the process? Would it be possible for you to run rendering locally on each of the nodes to see if they are rendering fine?

[Julieta]

Hi Maru,

thanks for your answer. No, we are not using distributed rendering. We are using only 1 node per frame.

[maru]

Do you know from which node that dark image comes? Can you try rendering locally on all nodes?

[Julieta]

We've only got 5 nodes with 24/7 availability and I tried rendering on each of them (by setting exclusive nodes in Render Manager), the result was always the same.
At night our workstations work as render nodes, and they had the same result. It's an animation of <100 frames and each frame had these "black overlay" look.
Unfortunately I can't render locally in our nodes because they are just render nodes, we can't use them as Workstations, I don't have Railclone or Forest Pack licenses on these nodes (and our iToo licenses are not of the floating type) so I can't open the files correctly in these.

[maru]

Do you know from which specific node that dark image comes?

We've only got 5 nodes with 24/7 availability and I tried rendering on each of them (by setting exclusive nodes in Render Manager), the result was always the same.

What exactly do you mean by "the same"?

[Julieta]

the same "black overlay" look on each of the frames

[Julieta]

Dear Corona team,

In the meantime we started checking our nodes when they were rendering and we realized that, somehow, the Physical Camera exposure control was overriding the Post-production settings in the VFB, we don't know how and why, because this was not happening locally. We are re-installing 3ds max in all our nodes. We never use physical cameras (Only Corona Cams), this project was an exception, so we had no idea this could happen.
I apologize for wasting your time and I thank you for your assistance.

[maru]

No problem at all and I am glad that you were able to get to the bottom of it! Sorry that we did not manage to really help you!