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Textures and geometry drop on certain frames
I'm heading up a fairly large project & we're having issues with textures and geometry dropping from rendered images on random frames. It's costing us lots of time/money & I'd love to get it solved. Some context:
We're Windows 7
We're using Maya 2012 Service Pack 2
We're using VRay 2.20.01
We're using Smedge 2011 Update 1 as our render farm manager
Our file server is on CentOS 6.2
We have about 200 machines, so there is a fare amount of network traffic
It happens with jpg/tiff/tga texture files -- pretty much any texture file we test. It seems to happen on the same geo per scene. I originally thought there was something wrong w/the particular models/texture files involved, but can't find anything wrong with them (normals are okay, no overlapping geo etc). Our scenes are high memory usage scenes (usually between 10 and 16 gigs), but our renderfarm machines have 32G of ram. There is no warnings or errors in the logs on frames that have missing textures/geo (besides warnings about large scene size, but we get that everywhere). Our "Message Level" is set to "all messages." Some of our machines were not running Maya Service Pack 2 & when we upgraded those machines the dropping geo went away (so far) but not the dropping textures.
To be more specific: it looks like the textures darken to almost black. ie, we can see some detail in the textures still. The issue is hard to reproduce. I'll render a frame locally on my machine & the issue will appear. Then I'll render the same frame again & the issue will be gone. Smedge in that case was not part of the loop. It happens apparently at random per machine / per frame, but more often with high ram usage jobs. We're using baked GI in most of our scenes, multi-frame incremental and animated. Our scene scales are quite large. Characters flying from one mountain to another in real world units, that sort of thing.
Has anything like this been reported before? I've looked through the forums & haven't found anything that sounds like this problem.
Any help appreciated.
Cheers,
Raphael
We're Windows 7
We're using Maya 2012 Service Pack 2
We're using VRay 2.20.01
We're using Smedge 2011 Update 1 as our render farm manager
Our file server is on CentOS 6.2
We have about 200 machines, so there is a fare amount of network traffic
It happens with jpg/tiff/tga texture files -- pretty much any texture file we test. It seems to happen on the same geo per scene. I originally thought there was something wrong w/the particular models/texture files involved, but can't find anything wrong with them (normals are okay, no overlapping geo etc). Our scenes are high memory usage scenes (usually between 10 and 16 gigs), but our renderfarm machines have 32G of ram. There is no warnings or errors in the logs on frames that have missing textures/geo (besides warnings about large scene size, but we get that everywhere). Our "Message Level" is set to "all messages." Some of our machines were not running Maya Service Pack 2 & when we upgraded those machines the dropping geo went away (so far) but not the dropping textures.
To be more specific: it looks like the textures darken to almost black. ie, we can see some detail in the textures still. The issue is hard to reproduce. I'll render a frame locally on my machine & the issue will appear. Then I'll render the same frame again & the issue will be gone. Smedge in that case was not part of the loop. It happens apparently at random per machine / per frame, but more often with high ram usage jobs. We're using baked GI in most of our scenes, multi-frame incremental and animated. Our scene scales are quite large. Characters flying from one mountain to another in real world units, that sort of thing.
Has anything like this been reported before? I've looked through the forums & haven't found anything that sounds like this problem.
Any help appreciated.
Cheers,
Raphael
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