Crop render from command line in 3.1

[pe_tor]

Hi folks

We have a script here at our facility that sends renders to our farm from maya, converts to a vrscene, and then renders through Vray Standalone as crop renders (rather than regions, so save on RAM usage when we have to do giant renders), and as of updating ourselves (finally!) to 3.1 this week, our crop function seems broken.
We're using the -crop=XXXX;XXXX;XXXX;XXXX argument from the command line submission, and the images are coming out as whole images, rather than the cropped portions.
Region rendering using the comparable argument ( -region=XXXX;XXXX;XXXX;XXXX ) seems to operate fine, and is functioning as a workaround, but golly gee, it sure would be nice to get that crop functionality back! : D
Anyone else run into this problem? Is this something that's fixed in the nightlies?

Thanks!
peteReynolds
Armstrong White

[ydm]

Hello, Peter!

This problem is fixed in the latest nightlies.

If you don't have access yet, please write to support[at]chaosgroup[dot]com and include the URL of this thread.

[pe_tor]

Our IT guy got nightlies access and we're going to try installing it today...Thanks!

[ydm]

That's great! Let us know if you run into any trouble.

[pe_tor]

We've tried a few builds from the nightlies site, to not success:
10-01-15, 11-26-15, 12-15-15, 12-16-15, 12-21-15

Our previous vray3.0 build works (retested it today)

We're in Windows 10 and Maya 2015 (if that matters)

Here's the command line that we're using to test:
"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2015\vray\bin\vray.exe" -sceneFile="XXXXX.vrscene" -crop=300;300;400;400
The whole image is set to 1920 1080, and in the new builds we're seeing the whole image render, rather than the crop.

Thanks for the help so far!

[Zdravko.Keremidchiev]

This is already fixed and it will be in the available in the next Nightly (Stable) builds.

[ydm]

To me, it looks like you've downloaded stable builds and not nightly, where it's actually fixed.

Our oldest nightly at the moment is dated 23-dec-2015. I just tested the crop functionality there and it's working fine.

You can find latest nightlies under the "Latest Builds" section. Download the latest one (29-dec-2015) and try again.

Or, if you insist on using a stable 3.1 build, we can assist you in writing a script that uses -region and then crops out the image to achieve the same result.

[pe_tor]

Correct, we did download the stable builds. When we click on the folders for the section labelled Latest Builds and the any/all of the dated subfolders in that section we don't see anything come up that we can download. When I click on one of the dated subfolders I see what looks like a red progress bar on the top of the page that fills left to right and then...nothing happens. Are we doing something wrong on our end accessing the site (we've tried 3 different browsers and on and offsite internet connections).

[ydm]

I guess you're not assigned correct access rights. Please write to support[at]chaosgroup[dot]com asking them for nightly builds access. And, of course, include the URL of this thread.

[pe_tor]

Well, support said we don't get access to the non stable builds as a commercial customer (I assume that's in contrast to being a development partner or something along those lines).

Thankfully the direct writing of .vrimg files is quite RAM efficient (and we recently upgrades lots of the nodes capacity), otherwise the 20k render our clients asked for would be in trouble. Though, it could have been risky/tricky to do a partial rollout of a non-stable build anyway...

Seems like the stable builds come along pretty frequently during non-vacation times, so hopefully we get on one of those soon!

Thanks for the help with this issue!


peteReynolds

[pe_tor]

We just noticed another, slightly related change in our pipeline when switching to 3.1:
When we run our vrimg files through the vrimg-to-exr converter that came with that version of VRay for Maya, the resulting .exr files do not have the data window set, whereas our older versions have this feature enabled. Would this also be changed when a new stable nightly comes out?
Should this separate issue warrant a separate discussion thread?
I can provide more information in the subject if clarification is needed.

Thanks

peteReynolds

[yolov]

I'm assuming you're rendering regions to vrimg? In any case, is there any chance you haven't ticked the "data window" option in the vrimg2exr tool? It wouldn't write the data window even before 3.10 without that option enabled.
If that's not the case, can you send us a vrimg file that won't have the proper data window after the conversion and let us know the build number?

[pe_tor]

Here's the word from the guy who makes our tools that use the vrimg to exr converter command line thingy:

"The data window flag is being set, but we are not getting data windows on images that are just regular frame renders that dont have something filling up the image.
this is seperate from the crop flag in the renderer not working."

If needed, we can make a little sample scene and supply that and a .vrimg rendered from it early next week.

Thanks!


peteReynolds
Color and Light Lead
Armstrong White

[yolov]

That would be helpful, yes.

[pe_tor]

We might have tracked down this second issue with the data window to being something going wrong with some of our Deadline stuff creating a syntax error on the vrimgtoexr command line...We'll be looking into this more thoroughly on our end and if we can isolate any bugs we'll provide demonstration files...But for now we're taking the blame on this one!

Thanks for all the help!

peteReynolds
Color and Light Lead
Armstrong White