animation prepass not working when batch rendering

[leabum]

I created a GI prepass for my animation as described here: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...ing+Objects+II
eventhough it is for Max it always worked for me with Maya also. But this time it just does not want to work when I batch render, whereas it is just fine as long as I render through the VFB.
Am I not seeing something?

Also Vray sometimes does not like to take my prepasses. It then just says '0 samples taken...' under the Mode: Animation(rendering). Does not happen all the time but sometimes.

[sharktacos]

not sure if this will help, but one thing to be aware of is that the GI prepass needs to be rendered on a single machine, not on a farm. You can also check your save GI maps with the imapviewer to make sure they worked. I did a Maya based tutorial for this workflow (of pre-rendering GI for animation) that you can take a look at here.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

I created a GI prepass for my animation as described here: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...ing+Objects+II
eventhough it is for Max it always worked for me with Maya also. But this time it just does not want to work when I batch render, whereas it is just fine as long as I render through the VFB.
Am I not seeing something?

Also Vray sometimes does not like to take my prepasses. It then just says '0 samples taken...' under the Mode: Animation(rendering). Does not happen all the time but sometimes.

Is there any chance to send us that scene for investigation.
Let us know the exact V-Ray and Maya versions that you are using and if you are performing something different from the tutorial you've followed.

[leabum]

Yeah, I did create the map on only one machine. Also I started just rendering out the beauty as a Sequence in the Framebuffer. I had the problem that vray would render but not save out the rendered images. So something is weird with my scene I guess. I reset the rendersettings and at least got rid of the sequence problem. Batch render does not take the GI prepass after all.

I checked in the irradiance map viewer, and it looks fine. I mean it renders correctly in the framebuffer its just the batch render.

I could, but what of it would you need. It is a complex scene with lots of textures, XGen, a Rig with several animated displacement maps. So is will be pretty huge I guess. Probably too big for my dropbox.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Let's first find out if this happens on every scene or just on that particular one.
Would it be possible to create completely new scene with a few basic primitives and lights and replicate the same render setup that you did for the other scene, if that works fine then we will be sure that something in the other scene is causing the issue and we will need to investigate what exactly.

As for the scene, we usually like simple scenes which reproduces the issue right away instead of complex ones where we have to troubleshot it a couple of days.
If you would like you may try to remove the heaviest details from the scene, along the external assets like textures, caches, Xgen, Rigs and see if the issue is still there.
If it is pack the scene along the GI cache files and send that version for investigation.

If the issue however disappears after stripping down those details it won't be useful for us and we will most likely need the full version of it.

We could provide our FTP server so don't worry you will have a lot of space to upload the scene.

[leabum]

Okay so I am using vray 3.4 in Maya 2016. I created a very simple scene and tested the prepass creation process and it worked just fine. I mean it is not the first time I created one, and problems tend to occur with prepasses sometimes but it wasn't that big of a deal so far.
I also simplified the scene the problem is occuring in (XGen removed, Imported Rig instead of reference, Vray MTL on everything istead of SkinMTL and textures...) and indeed the batchrenders now look the same as the VFB renders. Of course the prepass is not matching the original scene setup anymore but atleast the renders look the same. I you want I can give you the whole Maya Project during the next couple of days. I am is pretty busy right now and I would have to remove unessicary stuff from the project because now it is over 100GB which I dont want to upload.

[jasonazure]

Is this to do with the 'gi prepass' bug I found?

Details here > http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...radiance-files

[leabum]

thank you for sharing. The Irradiance Map looks fine on my side, atleats for this project. Otherwise it would not render correctly in the VFB I guess. I have another project where GI flicker occurs always for a couple of frames in a very specific area. Created the Prepasss two times and it is still there in the renders. Will check out your workaround. However I am not using 3d motionblur like you did, but just Motionvectors for Nuke.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

There is something in the scene that cause that discrepancy then and without it would be almost impossible to fish it out.
100GB project is a very large amount of data indeed, it won't be very easy to investigate but in case you can't send us a smaller project we'll have to work it out.

[leabum]

what I provide you will be smaller. The project includes ZBrush scenes and Mari arhives right now. So it will be a lot less. I will see if it will be small enough for my dropbox or if I have to ask for the FTP.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Since we can't open that scene into our environment for some unknown reason would it be possible to send us the log files from Maya Batch render and from Maya UI render so we could check if there is something wrong there?

[leabum]

Send you a mail.