General thing - is rendering via maya batch sometimes inconsistent / slow renders?

[joconnell]

Heya Folks,

Just wanted to get some general feedback. I'm using maya 2014 and vray 2.45 at the minute on a job that's got a simple character that uses alembic caches and a few vray lights to make a scene up. I'm finding on the render farm using deadline 6.1 that frames with occasionally spike in render time for no good reason and was wondering if anyone else had seen similar? The storage that the 20 machines are reading from is pretty beefy so bandwidth shouldn't be a big one - are there any issues with alembic falling over? Restarting the task in deadline will cause the frame to be assigned to a different random machine and go back to being minutes per frame rather than an hour plus, rendering locally will do something similar too. They're all decent 24 core dual xeon machines with 32 gigs of ram, there's no swapping going on and the geometry amount is static through the shot.

Are there any dumb oddities with maya, maya batch, alembic and vray I'm not aware of? Or is it just a case that maya batch just isn't great?

Cheers for any insight or any thoughts on how I can check a bit more closely what's going on with maya!

John

[Morbid Angel]

Is this with 3d motion blur? 3d displacement and are you loading alembic through vray proxy or regular maya alembic loader? I found a few problems with alembic using vray proxy recently, perhaps it could be another one related to it.

Side question but, are you using hair in your scene? is that hair yeti by chance? There was a bug exactly like that with yeti and vray and 3d motion blur that sounded exactly like this.

If not, then perhaps there is another issue there. We are not using vray 2 though.

[joconnell]

Yep - using 3d motion blur and while it's turned off, there's a displacement node in the scene that's there for a few specific shots where we want it, I'll try binning the node and see if it helps. No hair at all and we are indeed on vray 2.4.

I'm using the normal alembic loader at the minute - it was part of the pipeline established before I got in here. I presume with the vray proxy the same rules apply as in max in that it can't have attributes added to it afterwards and you have to have all of your materials / uvs and so on embedded in the export. If the compositors ask for an additional utility pass then it'd be going back a few stages in the process to add that in.

Have you used current fbx implementations much? I might give that a go instead of alembic just in case an older, dumber format causes less issues. The alembic implementation in maya seems to have a lack of support for lots of basics, maybe it's badly coded?

Cheers!

John