3DSMAX 2020 and Arnold farm rendering

[AnimationSB]

I experience a critical issue with our Arnold Farm rendering last weekend

Last April 22, 2020, we finished setting up our 5 Arnold nodes to our 5 farm PCs for rendering. Since then we have been having weekend rendering for almost every week since, all renders have been good on the farm (no issues with watermarks etc)

This weekend, there were suddenly some images which rendered with watermarks. We actually didn't notice them at first during initial checking on the rendered images thumbnails since the watermarks are faintly visible

It caused a massive delay in our delivery yesterday as we had to go thru all the images one by one and clean out the problem frames. I estimate it was about 10% or less of the entire rendering (of a 7min 30fps presentation)

image.png

I confirmed that the image was rendered by a farm PC (SB-233/10.0.0.233) which was set up for Arnold. We still have 199 days in our license

1.jpg

image (1).png

there was also not much consistent pattern in the appearance of the watermarks. for this scene camera, these were the ones with the watermark. the other camera of the same scene? all good renders

image (2).png

to the best of my knowledge, this should not happen on any occasion given that we have an active subscription

I would also like to confirm that I came across this posts, and have checked all the troubleshooting options listed. All have been done. We had no problems the past 2 months as well so these were not an issue.

An Arnold watermark appears in renders from a licensed workstation of 3ds Max 

This is an watermarked image I caught mid-render on another of the 5 Arnold nodes, SB-230/10.0.0.230. 

Watermark 01.JPG

I quickly canceled the render on backburner and opened Max to check. License active  

Watermark 02.JPG

I added the PC back to the farm render and no problems during the next job

Watermark 03.JPG

 

[jon.bell]

Hi AnimationSB,

Thanks for your questions on this. Could you please let us know if this issue has recurred on your local render farm?

If you see watermarks with one render node but not another, I would recommend making sure that each version of 3ds Max has the exact same MaxtoA plugin version installed. Even if you're not rendering with Arnold at all, having mismatched versions of Arnold can trigger Backburner errors and stop nodes from rendering successfully with Scanline, V-Ray or other renderers.

Thanks for your time, and I hope to hear from you soon!

[Stephen.Blair · Accepted solution]

You're using single-user licensing for render nodes? Personally, I would not do that. Network licensing is time-tested and proven for render farms. 

You can set Abort on License Fail (in the scene Render Setup). Then at least you won't be rendering watermarked frames.

[AnimationSB]

hello 

Thank you. The issue has been resolved already. I iwas able to directly contact Autodesk Global Product Support. This was the problem he identified and the solution shared to us:

That message confirms that there's a disconnection from your machine to our license server. Since this happens only on 2 of your nodes, I would say that this is isolated issue. In most cases, this could be due to firewall settings, anti-virus, unreliable internet connection and some other issue that would interrupt the machine connection to the internet. There are 3 options we could try here:

1.  As I suggested, please enable "Abort On License Fail" from 3dsMax.
2. Turn-off Firewall, anti virus and make sure Internet connection is stable.
3. Increase the License Service timeouts to 60secs (default is 30secs). This should be long enough to re-authenticate the license. To increase, append the file below:

We had the same MaxToA in all. Apparently, one of the computers just got disconnected or had internet issues, and lost access to the license server, causing it to be "unlicensed"

So far, we have implemented option 1 in our general workflow and had no issues since. In almost a month of rendering, there was probably only 1 moment when the Abort On License Fail activated because of a lost connection. I simply had to check and reconnect the said farm node and rendering has been going well since.

[AnimationSB]

---

@Stephen.Blair wrote:

You're using single-user licensing for render nodes? Personally, I would not do that. Network licensing is time-tested and proven for render farms. 

You can set Abort on License Fail (in the scene Render Setup). Then at least you won't be rendering watermarked frames.

---

I have single M&E Collection on my account, which comes with 5 arnold render nodes for 5 farm PCs. I still need to sign in and connect each to be able to render with no watermarks. How is this different from network licensing that you mentioned?

But yes, Abort on License Fail is the option that Autodesk support suggested. It is now part of the production routine.