Rendering cached fluids on farm

[pechart]

Hi!

I have a problem with rendering cached fluids on the renderfarm. When I send the scene to the slaves through our dispatcher (Renderpal) only the first frame of the chunk of let's say 4 frames is rendered with the fluid. In the remaining 3 frames the fluid is missing. I'm using the PhoenixFD shader with standard maya fluids. Everything is cached out.
Maybe I can get around this issue by just lowering the chunk size to 1 frame. But this creates a lot of overhead, of course.
Any ideas?

Thanks!

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Try with the next nightly build.

[pechart]

Will do, thanks!

[pechart]

We updated to

V-Ray for Maya version 2.25.01, revision 22643 from Jan 11 2013, 02:21:21

recently, because in the nightly we used before the velocity pass was broken. In that build the farm/fluid rendering worked.
But now we have the farm problems again with the build above. Can you confirm this?

Thanks!

EDIT: Hmm, maybe it never worked and we just submitted the jobs frame by frame... I have no time to look into this, so I'll just do it that way again.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Probably I've fixed another issue. Animation with cached fluids seems to work ok with simple scenes. If you get to this issue again, check if you can render the animation locally, and if possible send us vrscene.

[pechart]

I have another problem right now. Could it be, that vray doesn't flush it's cache properly after rendering cached fluids? It seems, that vray somehow "remembers" the last rendered state. And when I skip to another frame it does not render correctly.

I.e. I have an animation with some cached fluids. The caches have an offset on each fluid, so each cache starts some frames later then the on before. I also animated the visibility of the container according to the cache start (so, when the cache starts on frame 5 I switch visibility from off to on on frame 4/5). But If I render one frame of the sequence, then step back several frames and render again, the fluids that are hidden on this earlier state are still rendered. Even if I switch off the display layer of the containers.

Also it would be great to just ignore uncached fluids. And also fluids that don't have a cache on the actual frame.

EDIT: Oh, when I restart Maya, reopen the scene and render again beginning from Frame 1 onwards it works, btw.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

10x, with these steps I was able to reproduce it.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

We don't support animating the visibility for fluids. I will write this as a bug.

[pechart]

Ok. The point is, that I need to animate the visibility. My original cache starts at frame 1, but I have offsetted this cache several times to start at, lets say, Frame 20. When I don't set the visibility to on on that frame and to off before the fluid gets rendered with a random (?) cache state. So the fluid is visible but shouldn't be.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Yes we will fix this issue.I think you can achieve the same result using the "Disable Evaluation" check box.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

However it's more tricky, you must not change the time to a valid fluid frame before starting the rendering.