Turbosmooth and DR error

[rajdarge]

I have a character rigged with CAT, skinned and animated. after a while I got an unhandled exception error in vray with the turbosmooth on. I replaced the turbosmooth with a meshsmooth and It rendered ok.

I then rebooted the machine and put turbosmooth back and it rendered ok.

But as soon as I ticked "distributed rendering" I got some wierd effects.
If I turned this off the wierd effects went away.

I found that some of the remotely rendered buckets, the geometry was all over the place.

Also when I tried to render the scene with a number of xrefs in distributed render, I would only get the top left hand corner of the scene rendered (say 20 pixel square) and the rest of the frame buffer black would be unrendered or sometimes I would get a strange camera angle for my render frame. The strange camera angle would usually only occur with a camera attached to a path.
I moved turned the xrefs off and I no longer got the strange camera angle, but I did get the left hand corner effect.

so I cannot use my renderfarm (xpt perhaps with backburner) to render my scene

I have max 2010, vray 1.5sp3a both 32 and 64 bit windows xp
workstation computer = 64bit i7-940, one renderslave 64bit, 2 slaves 32bit. I tried individually taking the 64 bit or the 32 bit ones out of the farm but the problem still occurred.
Raj

[vlado]

Do you have a scene for this that you can send to us at vray@chaosgroup.com so that we can take a look?

Best regards,
Vlado

[joconnell]

I've seen that a lot - the poly object can get a bit corrupted sometimes. Turbosmooth uses a lot of shortcuts to get the speed increase and that might be at the cost of stability. I've had issues with turbosmooth where a mesh has been put through a lot of modifiers, morphers and so on - often the problem is visible in the viewport as well as the render though. Mesh smooth might be safer once you start getting issues in a scene.

[stevesideas]

Is it possible to convert your model to a editable mesh and then back to a editable poly and keep the rigging. I sometimes have to do that to sort out strange problems with a model.

[rajdarge]

I will put together a file (with as many dependancies as I can find) and send it to you.

No unfortunately I cannot collapse the stack as the "character" is rigged. I would lose all the skinning I have done, and perhaps even the animation I have done to date.

Meshsmooth works, but even that has issues with dynamic rendering.

Raj

[stevesideas]

What I would try is cutting everything about the base stack (into memory) and then converting it to an editable mesh and then back to a poly. Im pretty sure you should then just be able to paste the cut information back onto the model as the vertices should not have changed their order.

Im sure I have done that in the past..

[joconnell]

There's a few ways to get around it - you could try collapsing a copy of the object to a mesh at frame one, making a point cache of the epoly version and see will it drive the e mesh (once the vertex numbers don't change). Another option is to again copy the poly object, collapse to an emesh and use skin wrap with the original epoly to drive it. Both quite messy ways to work but they might get your through!

[rajdarge]

I might try to do as you suggest, but as I am a one man band I am animating from scene to scene as I go along, I cannot create a pointcache yet, as I render and redo and render and redo till it looks right. I have vrayRT but its pretty buggy at the moment (sorry vlado) so its on the backburner to learn and it was slowing down my production. My deadline is passed and people are screaming at me. (its hard to work in that enviroment, but I try).


anyways I have resorted to not using my renderfarm till this project is submitted. i am submitting the file to vlado, but if turbo smooth is causing so many problems - perhaps your guys should submit a problem file too cause its pretty well the future of sub-d modelling for max....
raj