[Maya 2016] - Vray DR missing buckets - cached nParticles
 

Hello Simply Maya!

I've been lurking these forums and finally decided to make an account! So hello all!

Right now I'm having some issues with Vray 3.1 Distributed Rendering and a cached nParticle system that is located on a shared UNC location accessible by my slave render machines.

For whatever reason I am getting missing buckets on my particle system when rendering out an animation, but when rendering out a still everything is fine.

I don't know what to think of this since the scene is very simple, the nParticles have been cached out, the cache has been saved to a UNC location. Below are the steps I'm going through to link the cache to the nParticle system just in case I'm doing it wrong (UNC location wise)-

http://screencast.com/t/Jqe6gYhDrv5o

Thanks guys n' gals for any help.

I normally map the share to a network drive, then i save my project to the mapped drive. Then make sure all network pc's have the same network mapping, that should then work.

Thanks for the reply. I'm chatting with Vlado on the Choasgroup forums and he said-

"The particle data is exported in the vrscene itself, the slaves don't need to access the cache. "

So sadly the slaves not having proper access to the cache (which they should how I have them setup), isn't even the issue. I'll update the solution if/when Vlado suggests something. If any of you guys have any ideas in the meantime feel free to post up.

Thanks much.

For a DR on a single frame that makes sense, the network machines not needing access to the cache, however on a batch render for an animation I'd assume that the slave machines would need access to the cache.

I'm no expert on vray network rendering and i'm not sure how you're sending the render job across machines are you using backburner? batchrender, deadline... In my experience Maya has always had problems with UNC locations try putting the cache in a mapped network drive the same one on both machines, it will take a couple of seconds and i'd be curious now to see if that's the problem.

It might make no difference like i say i'm not that familiar with vray network rendering but i would love to know ;)

Let me know how you get on.
Dave

Thanks Dave. I'll give it a go later today once I have a moment to catch my breath at work. Now, I have another question for you then... I'm not using any render manager atm. Just using Vray DR. Is this something by itself that would cause complications? We are looking to introduce Deadline into our workflow in November, but until that point we have no render manager (with the exception of Backburner when I'm trying to avoid if possible).

Just from personal experience I've had nothing but problems trying to render animations without a render manager. DR in both vray and mentalray (satellite) always works fine on a single frame then batchernder and bang problems.

I can recommend Deadline I use it and it does it job very well. As for backburner well... I'd save the frustration that comes with it and go directly to throwing PC's out the window, it's faster and it's what will happen anyway.

Dave

Well that makes me cry on the inside a little bit knowing that. I have a pretty large animation that I'm about ready to send off to the farm. I just figured Vray DR would handle it fine and that a render manager was really about having a queue as well as being able to schedule, and managing resources (not that it was absolutely needed to render out an animation with Vray DR).

I'm in no way doubting you, but would you mind sharing some of this issues you've come across in the past without using a render manager? Just so I can be prepared for what I'm getting myself into in case I decide to bypass using a render manager for the time being for this animation (since we'd be waiting til November for Deadline which is a few months off).

Thanks again Dave. Great info.

Well most of the issues have been with MR satellite so vray may be better, and i'm definitely not saying you need a render manager it can be done without one of course.

Most of the problems i've experienced with MR DR have been missing textures, not reading from UNC shares (needing to use a mapped network drive) not reading file caches correctly... the latest problem is with UV tiles MR DR sends out the first file in the sequence but does not send the subsequent files. Colour management on images in maya is working with MR DR on single frames but not on batch rendered frames.

Basically now a days I don't render animations without a render manager so it's been awhile since i've had any real problems.

I don't want to put you off you should be able to render out with Vray DR just expect it to be a PITA in my experience.

Sorry I can't be more vray specific I use it for still shots and for that the DR works like a charm.
Dave

Getting closer I think
 

Thank you for the reply again David. Update on my issue. I think I'm doing something weird with using the "Extra Vray Attributes", "Per-particle attribute export" (RGB and Opacity).

So below is an example of what I was trying to do-

Apply the Per-Particle attribute export (vray) to my particle shape to get the information-
http://i.imgur.com/gVOzSVC.png

Then go into my hypershade and use a particleSamplerInfo node to push what I thought were those values to the material I had applied to the particles-
http://i.imgur.com/b2Zqnx1.png


What I think I NEED to do (just sort of realized this tonight), is use the correct outputs on my particle shape node-
http://i.imgur.com/Z6T2HwC.png

However, plugging the "Vray PPExport Opacity" and the "Vray PPExport RGB" right into the material I've applied to the particles did nothing (as where using the particle sampler node sort of worked unless I was doing an animation in which case it failed).

So revised question. How do I use the Vray PPExports to drive my material? I feel like I'm getting closer at least.

Thanks all.


Edit: I guess the ParticleSamplerNode is the correct way to go about this...
Straight from the documentation-
http://i.imgur.com/OcH5LWH.png

Will pick up on this tomorrow night after work again.

So long story short, when I was creating the cache for the particles I evaluated Every .1, and saved every 10 to help with some stepping I was having with my particle system. When recreating the scene to recreate the problem I discovered that by evaluating every 1.0 and saving every 1.0 the issue is gone.

Apparently a cache that's evaluated ever .1 and saved every 10 (so still 1 cache file per frame) isn't something Vray DR likes?

Beats me, I've asked Vlado on the forums and will report here when I get an answer from him.

Damn that's not something i've come across, thanks for the update might save me some time if i ever hit the same set of circumstances.

No problem David! Thanks for all the replies, suggestions and help.

This seems to be nice forum. How's the activity on here? Is this a happening place?

I've originated over at Maxforums.org (fantastic forum full of great people), but I don't want to start pissing people off posting Maya questions on a 3ds Max forum, hah.

It's a nice forum certainly worth a bookmark if you going to be working with Maya. Been around for about 14 years lots of nice people.

Good luck with the animation and welcome to SimplyMaya :)

I lied.. Problem still persists. I guess I'll be filing a bug report with Choasgroup. Has nothing to do with substeps.

Tonight I'll be rebuilding the scene again and running more tests. Then I'll send Choasgroup the scene file.

EDIT: If anyone is willing to test mybase file that has a Vray 3.1 render farm (with Vray DR) l would more than happily dropbox it to you. For all I know it could be symantic antivirus messing with something.

Send me the dropbox link (dave@simplymaya.com) it will probably be tomorrow before i get chance to have a look but I should be able to tell you if I get the same problems