How to disable local rendering for vray scenes export?

[Aleksej Skrypnik]

Hi everyone,

I want to export .vrscnes to render them in V-Ray Standalone via Royal Render on the Farm.
Per default the images get rendered locally too during the .vrscene export.
If I activate the "Don't Render Final Image" option, V-Ray Standalone/RR picks up this option too and I don't get any images from the farm.

What to do?

Cheers,
Aleksej

[bdancer]

I'm not sure I've understood the issue correctly (how submission process works etc), but this option will only export the *.vrscene without rendering.

[Aleksej Skrypnik]

Thank you. This was the option I was looking for.

[Gosho.Genchev]

Just FYI, "Don't render final image" will stop the rendering process after e.g. Light Cache is calculated.

Cheers!

[Aleksej Skrypnik]

And does V-Ray Standalone support Volumes? I have a VDB with a V-Ray VolumeGrid Shader (V-Ray PhxShaderSim). It renders locally, but the farm renders are without the volume. The .vrscene files increase in size when I increase the volume resolution, so I'd suppose it should be supported.

[Gosho.Genchev]

It does, but it's possible your Standalone version is too old in case you are rendering baked volumes (you're saying VRScenes increases in size so my guess is that is the problem).

I will check to confirm and get back to you with the earliest Standalone version that supports baked volumes (I'm not sure that's in the official release builds) but until then, placing the VDBs on disk and loading them through a file SOP should circumvent this.

[Aleksej Skrypnik]

It is simply a teapod (Platonic Solids) converted to VDB via "VDB from Polygons".

[Gosho.Genchev]

Yup, and if it's not cached to disk, we bake it into the VRScene. The dev team had to implement this specifically for V-Ray for Houdini so live volumes can be rendered without the need of saving them to disk first.
The problem in your case is that other integrations had to pick this change up, and it's entirely possible that the Standalone version you're using doesn't know what to do with this baked volume.

I was about to suggest trying the official Standalone Next 2.1 update but unfortunately, there is more new functionality added specifically for V-Houdini that's not there either (the $AOV tag in the image output path). The only Standalone builds which seem to render Houdini VRScenes properly are the recent Standalone nightlies.

Please ping us if that's unreasonable for you guys (updating Standalone or saving VDBs to disk). We will try to think of something.

Cheers!

[Aleksej Skrypnik]

To cache everything first isn't a problem. Though I've encountered a different behaviour with the File Cache SOP vs. the File SOP:

If I write and also read the vdb cache via File Cache SOP, the vdb gets stored inside the vrscene (bigger file). The resulting farm render is empty because of the previous problem.
If I read the vdb cache via File SOP, the vdb does't get stored inside the vrscene(smaller file). The farm rendering works fine.

[Gosho.Genchev]

We haven't considered this case ... The devs are working on a fix to handle this. We're also looking to improve the export in general so e.g. Nulls, Transforms etc are not triggering baking of the volume to the VRScene.

I'll ping you once we have a fix.

Cheers!