Vray Scatter drops some frames during network render

morbidangel
Posts: 51
Joined: Fri Jun 08, 2012 10:51 pm

Vray Scatter drops some frames during network render

Post by morbidangel »

Hello,

We have an interesting issue where on some frames the trees disappear in the scene. This happens on pretty much every scene, if I have multiple vray scatters in the scene it is more apparent. I have this happen in the maya UI also. When I open a previously setup scene, the trees appear to be all bunched up in one end of the scatter plane, then if I re-open that scene again, they appear proper again. I have attached an animation sequence of a simple test.

We are using vray scatter for maya 1.3.2, windows 7 x64, maya 2012 x64 advantage subscription pack, vray 2.1

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks!
Attachments
test2.zip
animation sequence
(3.44 MiB) Downloaded 445 times
Last edited by morbidangel on Fri Jun 15, 2012 8:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
bdancer
Posts: 113
Joined: Tue Jun 28, 2011 9:09 pm

Re: Vray Scatter drops some frames during network render

Post by bdancer »

Hello, could you please post this scene?
morbidangel
Posts: 51
Joined: Fri Jun 08, 2012 10:51 pm

Re: Vray Scatter drops some frames during network render

Post by morbidangel »

I cannot post actual production scene, but I have made a test scene which reproduces the issue 100% without even using vray proxy. Its a simple sphere distributed on 3 planes using 3 vray scatter nodes.

As you can see in the images below, it happens not only on our farm but in the actual maya ui. When you open a scene, it bunches up the proxies on one of the planes into a corner. This does not happen every time, but it happens often enough to cause a problem.
Attachments
vrayScatter_inMaya_problem_normal.jpg
vrayScatter_inMaya_problem_normal.jpg (388.49 KiB) Viewed 30147 times
vrayScatter_inMaya_problem.jpg
vrayScatter_inMaya_problem.jpg (313.69 KiB) Viewed 30147 times
vrayScatterScene.zip
scene
(612.48 KiB) Downloaded 545 times
bdancer
Posts: 113
Joined: Tue Jun 28, 2011 9:09 pm

Re: Vray Scatter drops some frames during network render

Post by bdancer »

Could you please give me some guide of how to reproduce this? I've reopened the scene about 20 times without any issues.
morbidangel
Posts: 51
Joined: Fri Jun 08, 2012 10:51 pm

Re: Vray Scatter drops some frames during network render

Post by morbidangel »

The problem is more visible on the farm. Are you able to submit it for a network render as a sequence? If I render 50-100 frames of this scene you can see them disappear.
morbidangel
Posts: 51
Joined: Fri Jun 08, 2012 10:51 pm

Re: Vray Scatter drops some frames during network render

Post by morbidangel »

I also wanted to mention that the way we load the plugins could be related.

We use environment variables which are declared in the cmd file which define the paths to plugins like vray, vray scatter etc. We have gotten vray scatter to load correctly, but could there be a possibility it does not initialize something which causes this issue?

Like I said before, this does not happen every time, as you can see in the image sequence I have attached, out of 50 frames you may get 2-5 bad frames.
bdancer
Posts: 113
Joined: Tue Jun 28, 2011 9:09 pm

Re: Vray Scatter drops some frames during network render

Post by bdancer »

I don't have a render farm, but I'll try to find out what goes wrong. Thanks for your report!
morbidangel
Posts: 51
Joined: Fri Jun 08, 2012 10:51 pm

Re: Vray Scatter drops some frames during network render

Post by morbidangel »

I have tried to isolate the issue and I can easily reproduce it even on my local machine with maya batch. Below I have attached a script which I use to run maya batch once per frame, so for each frame it starts maya renders, then quits, then starts again, eventually resulting in a bunched up vray scatter objects. I hope this can be helpful for you.
Let me know if you need me to provide you the start up cmd file with env paths, otherwise you should be able to point directly to render.exe

import os
import sys
import glob
import fnmatch


try:

#replace this with your render command
renderer = "[path to render cmd]/startRender.cmd"

os.chdir( "[path to render cmd]" )

if len( sys.argv ) < 2:
sys.exit( "Usage: drop maya file" )
else:
workingFile = sys.argv[1].replace("\\","/")

if not os.path.exists( workingFile ):
print "check if you have permission accessing this file"

else:

projPath = "/".join( workingFile.split("/")[:-2] )
start = raw_input("start frame:")
end = raw_input("end frame:")

for frame in range(int(start),int(end)+1):
cmd = renderer + " -r vray -proj " + projPath + " -s " + str(frame) + " -e " + str(frame) + " " + workingFile
print cmd
os.system( cmd )

except:
raw_input("something wrong press enter to continue")
morbidangel
Posts: 51
Joined: Fri Jun 08, 2012 10:51 pm

Re: Vray Scatter drops some frames during network render

Post by morbidangel »

Hello,
I had this instance happen again in my maya ui. So at this time I have tried changing vray scatter settings to see if it would reset their position back. But no settings helped. Eventually after some tweaking maya crashed with following error:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: maya.exe
Application Version: 12.0.14.0
Application Timestamp: 4e80cae6
Fault Module Name: QtGui4.dll
Fault Module Version: 4.7.1.1
Fault Module Timestamp: 4e088ec0
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 00000000000277ff
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.4
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: f976
Additional Information 2: f976fb9e2406bc3709e830ef92c05978
Additional Information 3: 8249
Additional Information 4: 824996e6060f5cb81884e61fd1087ee5
morbidangel
Posts: 51
Joined: Fri Jun 08, 2012 10:51 pm

Re: Vray Scatter drops some frames during network render

Post by morbidangel »

So we have installed vray scatter 1.3.0 and it works fine our farm, I guess there is some kind of change that affected the 1.3.2 build.
Post Reply