Arnold licensing randomly failing 3ds MAX

[mpowers]

solidangle-arnold-license-server.txtRandom machines not checking out licenses from our licence server. Nothing logs. Just started happening after smooth working for last two weeks. I just blew a deadline because 21 frames of 1-4 hour per frame have a watermark on them!

I am trying use Arnold in a professional setting.

[Stephen.Blair]

There are no license denials listed in that debug server log, which means that the client machines never connected to the license server. That typically means there was some intermittent network issue (for example, a slow network connection).

What did the Autodesk licensing support team say? This is standard Autodesk licensing; Arnold uses the same licensing tech as many other Autodesk products.

Did you check the Arnold log or the Adlm.log on the client machines?
For Adlm.log, on Windows, look in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Autodesk\Logs

On a render farm, you should enable Render with Watermarks (Abort on License Fail).

[mpowers]

Is there more info on what exactly happens on "Abort on License fail"?

For example: when the frame is assigned to a node, does it load 3ds and the project, then check for a valid license (how many times, is there a wait time), then abort and kill the 3ds then start over again?

Is this considered a render fail by backburner?

If I use blocking does it only check out the license at the start of the assigned range? No blocking check for every frame?

Thnx

[Stephen.Blair]

Every frame is a separate license check out, always. The license is checked out only when Arnold is ready to render the frame (the scene has been translated to Arnold, Arnold has read in all the scene data).

The render aborts, it doesn't kill 3ds Max.

I would do a simple test on Backburner to see how it handles aborted renders.