Major problem, potentially IR map/xref related

[Neilg]

The basics - I'm working on a huge animation with hundreds of xrefs and proxies, culling them wont really be an option and the terrain is 750k polys so I only want to merge them in as a last resort.

Anyone seen this? Know why its happening?



Most of the other shots are rendering fine, although I have been having a lot of problems with IR maps and the xrefs so i'm wondering if its related. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt.

This was for a meeting on monday too, although the final doesnt have to be done until friday, it'd be nice to not have to explain whats going on and admit that its not supposed to look like that as I dont think the client really grasps the concept behind 3d.

edit: physcal camera, Vray sphere for sun and HDRI, IR map & qmc, adaptive qmc AA at 1,4, IR map being made as multiframe every 50 on medium, vray dirt on pretty much everything nested within the materials, QMC bounces set to 5, Reinhard mapping with a burn of .4, sub pixel on.
It doesnt flicker at this point, the fuckups are static.

[sv]

most of the time when i see pure black patches, it's down to co-planar faces. I had a similar problem once when importing a model from sketch-up, i think with the default settings on the export it made every face as a double, and i had similar looking renders. Firstly, i'd make sure that this isn't the case - sometimes it's hard to tell, especially when your dealing with meshes generated by another program. (if this is the case......)

otherwise, render a fresh IR map, i.e. check your not rendering from a saved file which may be superseeded by an update in your scene. As you've calculated it on multiframe, try calculating a fresh map, making sure that you have all the angles covered - perhaps every 25 this time. Be sure to clear any IR Map that may be in memory, and then use incremental add to current map to generate the new one. You can also render certain extra views of the whole scene, to make sure the IR is covering the entire geometry, and then merge them all using the Irradiance Map Merger.

You could also try to set your rays bias to something like 0.001, or 0.002 to check for co-planar faces, but it's best to stick to 0.0 if you can.

If none of these are related, and you say that every other Xref or Proxie is rendering fine, then you could see about having this one 'problem' block just being in the scene.... See if that does anything. I personally don't use XRefs as i've had trouble with DR and backburner not picking them up from time to time, even though all the paths were right and all UNC etc.

You could try merging the scene into a fresh, empty max file to reset all the settings etc. and see if you still have problems.....but this is getting to the last resort options....

[Morbid Angel]

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...ic.php?t=14300

[jacksc02]

The first image looks like an irmap gone wrong.
The second image looks like coplaner faces possibly caused by looping xrefs.
You might want to check the xref files that you are rendering and make sure they arent referencing any other files.

[Neilg]

The main thing that got me with this was that the same building has previously rendered fine, any extra work i'd done was on other things.

I'm going into work shortly anyway, so i'll give these suggestions a try. Thanks for your help guys.

[vance3d]

I don't know if this is related to what you're doing but I was having some trouble with an interior that I was rendering that contained a lot of xrefs and wasn't able to figure out what the problem was. The only thing that fixed it was switching back from dynamic memory to static memory in the systems rollout.

V Miller

[jacksc02]

any luck cubicleganster?

[Neilg]

Ive merged the troublesome xrefs in, turned the IR quality up a bit and sent it to the farm tonight, i'll find out in the morning.

Using static memory anyway, switching to dynamic pushes render times from 8minutes a frame to over 2 hours, haha. A bit useless.

[jacksc02]

good luck!

[Neilg]

No dice.



Its an improvement, if you could call it that, but its still shit.

Xrefs are now in the scene, faces are clean, models have been checked, new IR map was sent down at higher quality. The models are pretty clean anyway, they were modeled by the guy sat next to me in max so i know theyre good.

I'm fucked.

[ene.xis]

it looks like a bad irmap to me!
i d try to render loose frames with new GI solution to see if it happens again...

[jacksc02]

ok, can you send me part of the scene? I wanna help you solve this

[vlado]

Xrefs are now in the scene, faces are clean, models have been checked, new IR map was sent down at higher quality. The models are pretty clean anyway, they were modeled by the guy sat next to me in max so i know theyre good.

For this particular shot it looks like your irradiance map does not contain samples for this view of the scene. How did you generate the irradiance map?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Neilg]

I'm not allowed to send the scene out, although i'll see how desperate my boss gets when I fill him in on this.

IR map was multiframe incremental every 30 frames on medium 40,20, saved to a server we always use for them and rendered on only one machine.

More news - when I try to open the IR map in the viewer it comes up blank, then after rotating it to try to get it in view, it just crashes before I can see anything. Its 22mb, all other IR maps work in the viewer, even ones 3 times the size.

Could it be something in the scene corrupting the map?

[jacksc02]

could be, can you render a still frame ok?