V-Ray Animated Blend Material Not Rendering Properly

[ecarlsen]

I've got a V-Ray blend material with a base material + 8 coat materials, each of them with file textures plugged into both the base/coat materials and their blend amounts, and the top few layers have keys animating the color gain of the file texture from black to white, so that they're fading up over time. When I render single frames of this scene, they look as expected. However, when doing a batch render, the texture animation doesn't seem to occur. So if I start a batch render partway through the texture transitions, the appearance seems to start with whatever the appearance of the texture is at that frame, but then keeps that appearance throughout, as opposed to changing it over time. Has anyone encountered this before?

In case this is important to know, I've got some Phoenix FD sims imported into the scene. The blend material is applied to a broad landscape, and the individual overlaid textures have different "Repeat UV" values in their 2D texture nodes, allowing me to tile at different resolutions. But all of the blend amount textures have 1,1 for their "Repeat UV" values, as they're just low-res black and white images.

[ecarlsen]

Update: I created a simple test scene, where I'm animating the "Color Offset" of a file texture for the "Blend Amount" node in a Vray blend material over time, and am hitting the same bug, where the animation does not occur, and it simply uses the appearance of the texture based on whatever frame I start on, then keeps it the same and does not animate over time.

I also tried exporting as .vrscene files. If the playhead is on the ending frame when exporting out the vrscene, then all the frames of the rendered vrscene file have the texture as it appears on the ending frame. Conversely, if the playhead is currently on the starting frame when exporting the vrscene file, rendering the vrscene file only uses the texture as it appears on the starting frame. The same applies to saving out frames as individual vrscene files.

I've attached my test scene file here. It doesn't include the texture files, but any images could be plugged in.

Any ideas on how I could fix this? FYI I'm using Maya 2017.

[ecarlsen]

Update 2: I think I found a workaround. In case it's helpful for anyone else experiencing this, what I did was to pipe the alpha texture through a colorCorrect node on its way to the "Blend Amount" of the blend material, and then animate the colorCorrect's "Color Gain" from black to white. It worked in my test file, so I'm going to go into my original project and remake the couple of fading animations with that, after removing the current animation of the Color Offsets on the file textures.

[vfx_film_televsion]

Some animated attributes are not listed as animations in .vrscene. Whenever this occurs I create a VRayUserScalar-Node, animate the float value and pipe in the attribute which needs to be animated.


Kind Regards
Pirmin

[ecarlsen]

Thanks for the tip, Pirmin! That sounds like an easy approach that can be used for a lot of different situations.

[yolov]

We'll have a look at the scene, maybe there's something that doesn't export correctly in animation. I'll get back to you with more info later.

[nikolay.kusht]

It seems that we don't export the animation of the animated Color Gain attribute of the File node. We have added this as a bug to our system and we will notify you when we have any progress.