There’s a problem with irradiance and alembic’s animated visibility.
Make a plane, add an edge support and a vray subdivision attribute.
Parent the plane to a group
Animate visibility of the group then bake an alembic.
Load it in maya and you will see that irradiance map samples are generated on the plane without subdivision.
So the samples on the faces created by the edge support are deformed by the subdivision.
If you I could send you a file that recreate the problem.
It should render non-subdivided in all cases (with or without GI).
It’s just that the alembic exporter doesn’t read the vray attributes. You could simply add the attribute to the shape node after you have imported the alembic back to the scene.
Ok Sorry, I made an error with the process to recreate this error.
The vray subdivision attribute on the shape node is applied at the end. On the alembic.
I don’t know if I’m allowed to put it here that way but here is a scene example to reproduce the problem :
Removing the visibility key and adding it again makes it render fine. It seems there is a problem when we’re trying to read this key when set before exporting to alembic.
Yes, this is the same conclusion I had, but I wasn’t sure.
So, while waiting for a fix, I think we will tesselate our objects a little more to hide the effect, which is not a good a solution.
Because we cannot break then key again visibility at this step of our pipeline.