Objects missing in batch render

[ecarlsen]

I'm rendering a swamp scene which is moderately high-poly, just shy of 6 million, and has lots of referenced plants. Everything is there in frame buffer renders, but in batch renders I'm missing a bunch of plants & trees (seemingly random, though it's always the same ones). This is on a pretty new computer with Intel i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz (12 CPUs), 64GB RAM, GeForce GTX 1080, so I'd be surprised if it was a CPU/RAM/video card issue.

Any ideas what could be causing this or how I could work around it?

[ecarlsen]

Weirdly, I just re-rendered a frame of it and everything looks okay now. All I did was to add an additional reference of one of the objects, meaning the scene had even more geo than before. This is the first time it's worked after 3 previous attempts, and it is still working after removing that new reference.

So I'm glad it's working, but how can I prevent this issue from cropping up again when I'm closer to my deadline? Has anyone encountered this before?

[ecarlsen]

Ack, now I'm missing objects again... Help!

[yolov]

What version of Maya and V-Ray are you using? What is the OS where you run your batch render? Is it on the same machine or on a render farm?
Do you have DR enabled for the batch render?
It would help if you can post some logs - both from maya and V-Ray - there might have been a problem for maya or vray loading the reference files, for example.

[ecarlsen]

Hi Yolov, here is my info:

I'm using Maya 2017 (no service packs installed yet...maybe this is part of the problem?)
Windows 10 Professional
Rendering on same machine (not render farm)
Distributed Rendering is not enabled

I've attached the portion of the Maya log for a single-frame render I just did, in which objects were missing once again. I've also attached screenshots of a single rendered frame which looks correct, and the one with missing objects (both are compressed JPEGs at 50% scale, for uploading purposes).

Interestingly, the issue seems to only appear when initiating a batch render from within Maya. When initiating a render from a .bat file created in Notepad, I haven't had any problems thus far.

[yolov]

Here's some quick observations on the log:
*) Hmm, I'm not really sure what 'xfrog' is, but there's a message in the log that says that the xfrog plugin cannot be loaded, as it's not declared in MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH. This could mean that the scene was set to use the 'xfrog' plugin, but it's either not installed on the machine or is incorrectly installed and Maya is unable to figure where to load it from.
* ) There's a bunch of "Error: line 1: More than one object matches name: PR04y_EC:trunk" messages, which most probably means namespace clashing - i.e. more than one reference file uses the same namespace and Maya is (probably, this is just a guess) discarding the ones it cannot deal with. Check your references' namespaces.
*) I don't see any errors or warnings from V-Ray in this log, which could mean that the problem is in Maya. See the above two points I made.

What you can also try is - from a regular GUI session - export vrscenes and render with V-Ray standalone - all the reference geometry and shaders will be exported to a vrscene and the namespacing/referencing issue should go away (as long as the scene itself was loaded properly).
Another thing is to do a material layer override and put a simple lambert on everything and do a batch render with maya sofware or any other renderer - if I'm right about the referencing issue (namespace clashing) - the problem will still be there.

See if any of the above helps and of course, let me know if I can help in any other way.

[ecarlsen]

Thanks for your help. Will try the approaches you mentioned.