Particle Flow + Vray 1.5 RC2 = No Network Render

[Dra(hen]

I have an animation where we used Max's particle flow to create a potted poinsettia. It renders great in Vray 1.5 TC2, except when we send it to a network render. We have used Particle Flow geometry successfully before in version 1.49.28 over the network. This is apparently new to 1.5.

The following error message is returned by all servers, and then the servers all timeout, and the job just sits in the queue.

[V-ray] UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: Calling EvalWOrldState() for node 'PF Source 01 -> Event 02' at time 0
I am not currently aware of a way to extract a mesh from a Particle Flow. Since this is not really that polygon heavy, it would be the optimal workaround. Obviously if Vray could render particle flows in a net render capacity, that would be the best.

I have a solution, which is to render the poinsettia by itself locally on one machine and composite it back into the scene. But as we are using ambient occlusion passes, this requires multiple files and several alpha channels.

My workaround is sufficient for now, but obviously this will be something that will occur again. If anyone has any feedback that would be great.

Thanks,

Lee Johnson
Corgan Media Lab

[Morbid Angel]

you may try 2 things:
1 - cache the particles and try network render
2 - use mesher to bake particles into mesh.

[jacksc02]

odd problem there, i was using pflow to scatter some trees a couple of days ago and it all worked well in RC2.
Are the objects for the poinsettia a collapsed mesh?

Also, what is happening in your PFLOW event 2?

[DaForce]

yeah could you post a screengrab of your pflow setup

[Dra(hen]

Dmitry - Thank you, that worked perfectly. I did some searching late last night, but was not able to figure out a way to convert a Particle Flow into a static mesh. Mesher was exactly what I was looking for.

Jacksc02 & DaForce - sure thing. Here are the screen grab of both ways I tried the particle flow heirarchy. Event 1 generates the canopy of flowers and Event 2 distrbutes leaves around the base. Neither one worked. Also both of the objects being distributed were pretty simple pieces of geometry.



This is a tiny detail in a project that has been dragging along the final mile of production. It wraps tonight, and I think it was just one of those things that if I really had time to troublshoot, I could get it working.

Thanks for your input!

Lee

[jacksc02]

interesting setup. any chance you could share a render of the tree?

[DaForce]

Hmm particle setup seems pretty normal, nothing "whack"

Your right it may very well be a Vray bug. I cant see why it would be a bug but then again it isnt working so something is up.
Could you test maybe just a basic particle flow just spitting out some particles straight up and see if that works over a network render.

[vlado]

Lee, it would be very helpful if you can send me a scene (with just the PFLow system in it) so that I can try to troubleshoot that here to vlado@chaosgroup.com

Best regards,
Vlado

[Dra(hen]

I am working towards a deadline tomorrow, but as soon as I out from under the gun, I will get some renders up here of the poinsettia (for jacksc02), as well as do a test of just the Pflow across the network. All of my tests were of the poinsettia Xref'd into another scene where the cameras were along with many other elements. If I run into the same problem to the scene where the Particle flow is native I will send you that one. If not, I can zip up all the extra files that make up the scene that I am having problems with.

Thanks again for all of your alls input.

[jacksc02]

just to clarify, was the camera you were rendering from in a XREF file?

[Dra(hen]

No, all of our render files have the cameras native to that file, usually lights as well. All geometry is broken out into several different files, and xref'd (using xref scene) to make it more manageable.