I have a scene with particles with dynamic material operators (set to match particle ID). It appears that the particles are getting different ID’s on my different nodes causing materials to flicker.
Is there something I can do to stop this? or do I need to render on the one machine.... or is there another cause I should be looking into.

All the machines are x64, with max 2009 x64, box-3, creativity extension, and the latest hotfix installed.

Any ideas?

patrick.reformstudios.com

If you are using any bitmaps in your material, I would make sure that all render nodes are accessing the same images.  I’ve had machines reading the local drive encounter images that had been changed/replaced so some render slaves had different output.

Is it the same machines rendering incorrectly, or is it all machines doing their own thing?

3ds Max Design 2012 64-bit - Subscription Advantage Pack / PU10
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

there’s no bitmaps. And its only some machines misbehaving. Strange. I managed to render it out using distributed rendering without any problem, so its definately something to do with the way each machine assigns IDs to the particles, rather than a pathing issue.

patrick.reformstudios.com

What operator is assigning the mat ID?  I’m curious what would cause some machines to process it differently than others.

3ds Max Design 2012 64-bit - Subscription Advantage Pack / PU10
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA