Licence fail when internet goes patchy

[davidAZX57]

At the office on occasions the internet goes down for a bit, or is slow/patchy. If i'm rendering a sequence using arnold kick then I randomly get watermarked frames. Is there any legal way around this? Like an offline mode or something? I've clearly got a licence, it seems pretty overkill to check every single frame! I've seen the "on licence fail" options but aborting isn't much better than watermarks

Any help would be appreciated, having random watermarked (or failed) frames is not very productive.

Thanks

[Stephen.Blair]

You can borrow a license from the license server.

Arnold uses a license only while rendering. So when a frame finished, the license is checked in.

[davidAZX57]

Hi Stephen, thanks for responding so quickly. In the context of the above, what does "borrow a license from the license server" mean?

I have a single user licence if that helps, so any kind of local licence server would still be affected by the intermittent internet outage.

Kind regards

David

[Stephen.Blair]

I assumed you had a network (multi-user) license. But that wouldn't require an Internet connection, it would be the local network connectivity that would be a problem.

Single-user licensing does not require an Internet connection, except for once every 30 days when you have to re-activate by signing in again. I suspect something else is happening with the local licensing service.

Did you get detailed Arnold log for these renders? That would show what licensing error happened.

There is no way around it, as far as I know. Did you contact Autodesk licensing support? Single-user licensing is used by all Autodesk products, and they know how to troubleshoot it and collect diagnostics and logs.

[davidAZX57]

Hi Stephen

Just to clarify before I contact Autodesk, this is not the Arnold licence that comes with Maya, this is a separate purchase of Arnold on it's own that is used to render ASS files generated from Maya via a command line batch.

The other frustrating thing with this, is if I just render those missing frames through Maya, there's often something different which prevents the seamless fix, in this case a HDR is dimmer via maya (same scene, no changes) so I can't fix the broken ones without going back through command line.

I will check the logs when I get a moment (and am not under a tight deadline) and report back.

Thanks for the continued support

[Stephen.Blair]

An Arnold license uses standard Autodesk single-user licensing, just like Maya or 3ds Max.

Sounds like the color management is not the same in Maya...

[davidAZX57]

Hi Stephen

I've just tested turning Wifi off and it did work, which doesn't help narrow down what was causing the random watermarks. I'll keep an eye for it happening again and look out in the logs. Good to know its the same licence as Maya and has 30 days "offline", it certainly rules out what I thought was the obvious, but perhaps was just a coincidence.

Regarding the colour difference, the files are exported via Maya 2022, with Arnold 6.2.1.1, i'm not aware of being able to change the colour management separately to the export, and it only affected the HDRI, nothing else in the scene was affected. I know I'm hijacking my own thread but can you think of any reason it would do this, or how to fix?

Thanks again