Missing geometry

[arail]

I'm missing geometry. Yesterday I was lighting with the sun, today with the dome light.
Notice how much geometry is suddenly missing. Any thoughts, advice, anything - much appreciated.

[arail]

Carrying this forward -
It has something to do with groups. The large platform taking up the left two thirds of the image was a parent group called North Group (I group whole areas of groups so I can turn them off to see the other side of the room from that position). When I exploded that group, the missing platform group to the right re-appeared. But not everything that disappeared re-appeared. Notice that one of the columns on the left platform is still missing and the aluminum frame at the bottom of the glass enclosure to the left is also missing.

I hope someone from Chaos can comment on this.

[andybot_cg]

could you post any part of your model that's disappearing? That or send your scene to support.
I'd be glad to look at the file and see if the recent updates fix anything.

[arail]

Thanks andybot. I'm out, will be back late in the afternoon and will post the model as soon as I get in.

Off topic - for anyone who's following this thread the new dome light in V-Ray alone justifies the cost of the software! - A beautiful, smooth, easily controlled light source that makes everything in your scene beautiful even before you've begun to adjust the controls or add hdri, etc.

[dkendig]

I have not seen this behavior recently, I was under the impression that this issue was fixed during our beta process. Please do send us a scene file that would help us reproduce this error. You shouldsend it to vfswip@chaosgroup.com, and include any steps necessary to reproduce the issue. Thank you for reporting this issue! I'm glad to hear you are pleased with the dome light. Have you played with the render presets by any chance? They make quick setups even easier!

[twcox]

Devin,

I seem to be having the same issue as well. I didn't really come across the issue while running the beta, but now I am. I don't know if I'm putting to many groups within groups within groups, etc. or what exactly is going on, but I too am missing geometry when I go to render a scene.

Sometimes I can get geometry to render if I turn off several layers but it seems as if the more layers I have on, and in turn, more complexity in the scene, more and more objects get skipped over in the rendering process and appear completely transparent.

[dkendig]

we have received a few reports from users about this, and some sent in scene files. It appears that we can in fact reproduce this issue now. The underlying issue is that when we encounter a missing material or texture, the scene parsing process halts, but the render proceeds with whatever information it managed to extract prior to the error. This was part of a safeguard to ensure that we didn't render a scene if there were missing assets. We are working to resolve this currently, and will have a fix in an upcoming patch. I encourage everyone with this issue to send in a bug report to vfswip@chaosgroup.com so that we can track how common of an issue it is, and verify that we can reproduce and diagnose the issue properly.

[twcox]

Thanks Devin.

Is there something we could do as part of a 'quick fix'? Maybe make sure the materials are shared between SU and VfSU?

[dkendig]

If you go to Plugins->V-Ray->Debugging->Open Debug Window, you should see our python error log. In that error log, you should see reference to a material that is missing. "In __handleReferencedPlugin for /LEATHER/Diffuse::BRDFDiffuse, could not find asset with url /LEATHER/Diffuse/Texture", or something to that extent should be visible in that error log when you encounter this issue. The underlying issue here is that an asset named "/LEATHER/Diffuse" (the material named LEATHER's diffuse layer) is referencing a texture (/LEATHER/Diffuse/Texture) that does not exist for some reason. If you were to open our material editor, and select the material named "/LEATHER", and look at the diffuse layer's textures, there should be one that is invalid or set to None. If you just choose a valid texture in our texture editor and then click OK, it should be fixed.

Another example would be when an entire material goes missing for some reason (we have submitted a bug report to Trimble about this case, because that is actually a SketchUp bug). If you see an error saying it can't find an asset named "/LEATHER", then the error is telling you that the material itself (the material name is always the beginning part of the url) does not exist. If you look in our material editor, and you don't see a material by that name, just create one by that name, and you should hopefully be able to render again. This particular situation should be fixed in a nightly build, and will be available in an upcoming patch.

[twcox]

Thanks Devin. I had deleted a texture named "Asphalt" a while back and apparently it was searching for that material despite it no longer being there. I went a head and added a new texture with the same name and everything started rendering correctly again. I really appreciate your help! Hopefully Arail's problems were solved as well (sorry for hijacking your thread with my own issues).

[dkendig]

I'm glad you could work around the issue