V-Ray Clipper not positioning correctly in backburner renderings

[JuhaHo]

I wonder what may cause this. If I render a frame locally clipper object is correctly placed. However when I send an animation to backburner, the clopper object is everywhere, but not there where it should be. Is this known issue?

Does this leave any other possibility than rendering animation locally on a single workstation?

I won't be posting any screenshots or scene files due to NDA.

[JuhaHo]

I really don't understand this. Now I'm rendering it locally, it does the same. However if I move frame by frame manually, it renders correctly, but as soon as I try to render a short sequence of frames, the clipper flies around in scene.

Any ideas?

[JuhaHo]

Why is the clipper object clipping different place to where the clipper object is located in the scene? I doesn't make any sense.

[JuhaHo]

Still not working, In fact the results are getting even more weird.

Is it really so, that V-Ray clipper is not updating properly during sequence rendering. So it's possible to produce an animation only rendering each frame individually frame by frame. Can it be? It's a huge task if there's thousands of frames to do.

[JuhaHo]

So, I thought if the problem is having too much objects to be clipped and tried to reduce the amount by collapsing and merging some objects into one. However I run into another issue that has been with max quite a while - the face normals became a mess which makes some object render black.

Any Ideas on how to fix this? I really don't have time to render this frame by frame.

[yavor.rubenov]

Hello,

What is your V-Ray and Max version ? Are you using an infinite plane or mesh clipper ?

Best regards,
Yavor

[JuhaHo]

Thank Yavor.

I'm using the latest nightly of V-Ray 5 2.3 with Max 2022. Yes, I have infinite plane as a shadow catcher and I'm using two mesh clippers. The other is a box primitive and the other is mesh object.
objects do not intersect.

[JuhaHo]

It seems, whenever I move camera, clipper starts to move. So it's possible to render a sequence only when stationary camera is used. Is this correct behavior?

[yavor.rubenov]

Seems like you are hitting an old bug with clipper and moving cameras. It is fixed in V-Ray 6 if that's an option for you..
Other than that - you can set an environment variable VRAY_MAX_SCENE_OFFSET_ENABLE with value 0 before starting Max (for back burner machines maybe add the env var to windows env vars and restart the machine).

[JuhaHo]

Thanks,

I cannot currently afford moving to V-Ray 6. Does it even have perpetual licensing option? I mean if I'm middle of a project and cannot pay the fee, then I'm permanently out of business. That's why I prefer perpetual licensing and upgrade the software whenever convenient for me.

So, I can't zoom in when V-Ray clipper is in use. I need to do separate clips instead of zooming.

[yavor.rubenov]

As I said - if you can't go to V-Ray 6 then you can use the environment variable I mentioned. With it your scene should render as you've set it up.

[JuhaHo]

Now, wait a minute. I just made another animation where I moved both camera and clipper object. It works there perfectly fine. It has to be something else, but what? "Taas apinaa koijataan" as they say here (The monkey's being cheated again).

However, I cannot share that animation nor scene file due to NDA.

[JuhaHo]

It would be nice, if there were a stationary clipper apparatus, which would remove geometry as it travels through it. V-Ray clipper is unpredictable and works only rendertime, which is not a good thing at all. I don't even talk about 3DS Max boolean objects.

TyFlow tySlice is good, but it's a modifier and moves along the object - not stationary. This looks bad in renderings.

[JuhaHo]

Actually, it's moving even when camera is not moving. Closer look tells me, that it's one of the servers that got does wrong.

[JuhaHo]

I have updated V-Ray 5 to the sever where clipper is moving. It renders now correctly.