Serious problems with a scene - might be skin wrap?

[joconnell]

Hi Vlado,

I'm working on a pretty big scene at the minute which involves skin wrap and thinking particles rigid body sims and I'm having huge problems getting the scene to render. I'm getting a vray unhandled exception when it's preparing objects that have a skin wrap modifier on them - there's a lot of objects in the scene using it so it'd be quite tough to set them up again using different methods - is there anything else I can do to solve this? It might be the scene being dirty after being worked on so much but I'm having huge issues at the minute with 3dsmax crashing after opening the material editor or staying stable after a frame has finished writing.

I've gone back to vray 2.10.01 on max 2012 64 just in case it's causing other problems.

Many thanks!

John

[joconnell]

Okay it turns out that turning off the velocity render element stops the render crashing which leads me to believe that the skin wrap mod is passing bad vector information to vray. I'll have to render with 3d motion blur which hopefully won't have the same issue but it might be helpful for someone in the same situation later!

[Morbid Angel]

yup its exactly that. We had to deal with that on a past project and I was able to find a solution. I think the solution was to put a turn to poly modifier on top of your skinwrap. By applying this modifier it reordered the verts on the fly and this seemed to have solved the problem, and we were able to get proper motion vectors.

[joconnell]

You're a star Dmitry. Also for laughs I also seemed to have corrupt vray settings too - lights stopped working in my scene as if lights were turned off in the vray dialog and I was getting random crashes after a frame rendered or I opened the material editor with shaderballs. All in all a very fun wasted night!

[Morbid Angel]

hehe. In any case we typically render the "utility" passes as a separate job. So if there are problems we can just avoid re-rendering the beauty. What we had to do was to edit the util jobs on the fly before rendering and parse the scene for any skinwrap geo and assign turn to poly mods to it. Worked well, but nearly brought the project to a halt.

[joconnell]

I'm jealous of that whole "we" thing you've got over there

[Morbid Angel]

well the turn to poly solution was my find, but I had help from quite a few very talented max TD's to make it happen. That studio is no more though

[joconnell]

Yep - bit of a shame alright, still though you had the benefit of it while it was there!