MR3 rayhosting nightmare

[netiglobal]

Has anyone had problems rayhosting with MR3.0 in XSI 2.0? I've properly set up my .rayhosts, etc. Both machines are running on the same port. I even ran a test:

ray3 -verbose 6 -xcolor on

and it recognized the slave succesfully. When I drop a scene onto the 'XSI 2.0 Batch Render' shortcut on the desktop, it starts to pre-process ok and ray3.exe even pops up on the task manager on the slave. But after a few seconds of pre-processing, ray3.exe shuts off on the slave and the verbose in the shell on the host keeps reading that its 'sending to host' or 'waking host' or 'reading host' or something to that effect. After a few minutes of this, the shell just pauses and sits there. Both the host and the slave are 0% cpu. The host still has xsibatch.exe running in RAM. I don't know if this is normal or not. The scene is just over 1 million triangles. It is quite large but it does render fine on just one box. Its only when I try to rayhost that it holds like this. Any ideas? Thanks.

Kris

Kris Rivel
animator/designer
I O M E D I A
www.io-media.com

[atyss]

Bonjour Kris,

I don't know if this will help you (my experience with XSI is minimal, and I never done network rendering with it). But I use Softimage 3D in production and found couple of things.

1-I'm only able to use the rayhost file through the interface. When I want to render with a shell, the render does something similar to you: it starts, but does not get further than processing the first frame.

2-Even when I render through the UI, I take a risk. Sometimes it renders only the first frame.

3-No matter if I render through the GUI or the shell, I can't stop the render. Technically I can, but if I do so some parts of the projects (it can be an effect, a picture, or anything else) end up corrupted.

The best solution to this, imho, is to open a shell on each machine and start the render on each of them. I don't know if this can be done with XSI (still strugling with modeling and texturing).

Hope this helps
Salutations - Cheers
Bernard Lebel

[netiglobal]

no, this happens through the interface and through a shell. I've been looking for help on this subject but I think I'm the only person in the universe to have tried rayhosting using MR3. I have no problems rayhosting through interface or shell using Soft3D/XSI 1.5 and MR2.1. I only have this problem with MR3.

Kris Rivel
animator/designer
I O M E D I A
www.io-media.com

[wolfinger]

sounds like it crashed =/

I dunno, I haven't tried network rendering with XSI2 yet, just 1.5, and that worked just fine.