Hi guys,
I'll be checking out both these options on Monday as I have had the same issues with both 7.1 and now 1.0. Setting up UNC paths is a good start and this helped me with the issue of maps being dropped (even when the maps are stored on a network drive that all nodes can see).
The banding/gamma issue when using an HDRI in the environment slot has been an ongoing issue though. We managed to address the banding issue by loading the HDRI as a bitmap, but obviously this method is not ideal to retain the best control over the HDRI. I guess like a lot of people, we have used the vray HDRI loader to control the HDRI within the scene until now and this method always produces the dark banding when using DR (it renders perfectly on all stand alone machines), So this leads me to believe that DR has an issue reading the correct gamma (or reading the HDRI at all if loaded as an HDRI into max's environment slot.) I'm looking forward to a corona version of the VrayHDRI that gives the same kind of control with rotation, inverse gamma and so on in coming months but until then I will try both suggestions mentioned above.
If anyone has a confirmed DR workflow using and HDRI in the environment slot please feel free to let me know :)
Have a great weekend everyone.
MB