Rendering Animation in DR w/o Batch fails

[pechart]

Hi!
I have a scene that renders perfectly fine in DR on single frames. When I try to render the corresponding sequence it doesn't work, though. When I disable the "Render animation only in batch mode" switch I get a lot of warnings like this:

// Warning: V-Ray : Mesh "polySurfaceShape3567" has changing number of vertices (0 expected, 17 actual).

And VRay just skips to the next frame in the sequence. I don't get those in still frame mode.

When I try to render in Maya Batch mode, it writes out the temp scene but hangs forever on

// Result: Rendering with V-Ray... //

without any visible progress and a very low CPU usage.

I don't want to push that job to the farm to avoid a lot of caching work and plugin (fractureFX) deployment. And if it works for still frames it should also work on sequences, right?

Versions: Win10 Pro, Maya 2017 Update1, VRay core version 3.25.01, Build 26872 from Jul 26


EDIT: At some point it finishes the rendering with a regular:

// Result: Rendering Completed. See mayaRenderLog.txt for information. //

message. But no images are written, whatsoever. I can upload the maya log, if it helps.

EDIT2: Uhm, is it possible to rename the thread title to something like just "Rendering animation in DR fails"? Thanks!

[pechart]

Here's the renderlog.

mayaRenderLog_DR.zip

[pechart]

Uhm, nothing?

[tashko.zashev]

Hi,

I'm not sure what is happening with this setup, but let me try to reproduce it here with my scene first.

[tashko.zashev]

Can't reproduce this here with my scene. Can you send me your files?
Do I need to install FractureFX ?
Thanks.

[pechart]

Yes, you would need to install it. Also the caches are 2GB for the rigid bodies and particle sims. I don't have the caches available to all clients - maybe that's a problem? Edit: putting all cashes to network drives doesn't help.

[tashko.zashev]

Can you confirm that the issue is only when render in DR? The main machine can render some frames successfully ?
Is it possible to convert a few cashes (frames 1-5) to alembic files and run another test render ?

I believe that we don't need the cache files for the entire animation, just 4 or 5 should be enough to test this here? Please pack the scene and send it to support at chaosgroup.com

Yes, you would need to install it.

I will send request to FractureFX for a trial version of their product.

[pechart]

- Yes, without DR it renders fine, both directly through the render button and also with regular batch rendering.
- I'll try to cache it, yes.
- You could also just sim some frames on your site. Then the scene would become very small, just a few kb.

EDIT: So I cached the sim into an alembic and deleted everything fractureFX related. The problem remains. But I found a lot of empty transforms that may be related to the errors. Will check.

[tashko.zashev]

- Yes, without DR it renders fine, both directly through the render button and also with regular batch rendering.
- I'll try to cache it, yes.
- You could also just sim some frames on your site. Then the scene would become very small, just a few kb.

EDIT: So I cached the sim into an alembic and deleted everything fractureFX related. The problem remains. But I found a lot of empty transforms that may be related to the errors. Will check.

Great. You can send us the files now to test them here if you haven't found the problem already.

[pechart]

I need some time on another project right now, after that I'll strip a scene and upload that.

[pechart]

Here's a scene:

https://we.tl/u5453aUOcZ

And here's a corresponding fractureFX cache, so you don't have to resim:

https://we.tl/ESuHmhMMXc

Thanks!

[tashko.zashev]

Hi and sorry for the late reply.

It seems that all the download links have expired. Would it be possible to upload the files again? You can also crate a ticket in our system about this issue by sending an email with links to: support@chaosgroup.com