I have strange issue recently. Basically, single frame from the sequence is rendered differently than whole sequence.
Specifically:
I have a crowd with simple animation - line of soldiers who shoot with slight delay so it makes the effect of “Mexican wave”.
It is crowd sim, cached. Everything works in the viewport. If I render a single frame, it is also OK.
However, when I render whole sequence the delay of animation (“mexican wave effect”) is lost and all of soldiers shoot simultaneously.
See attachment:
I also find out that I am getting this message on ROP, not sure if its relevant to the issue:
Degraded time to first pixel due to pre-render geometry caching. Please, consider saving your geometry to Alembic and any volumetric effects to VDBs before rendering.
Are you rendering standalone, and is it alembics with the abcframe shifted?
I am rendering directly from Houdini. I have one node with crowd sim. Then “rendering node”, where I import geometry field of crowd sim through DOPio…
Any luck for a hip file (simplified if full is not possible)?
Yep, this time it is quiet simple .]
I sent it via PM
Usually when I render these, I bake the animation of the actor, bake the animation/attributes of the points, then copy to points the alembic in a separate geometry that is for rendering, and assign shaders to it. Good for readability and reliability 
And the bakes can be easily automated.
Thanks for the advise. And is it because you encounter similar errors? Or it is more convenient when you are working in a team?
I am a freelancer and usually working on my part alone and just sending to the other part of the team renders… So this just introduce one unnecesary layer for me.
I see - mine is a design made for renderfarms and standalone rendering, in a render from a single node and from Houdini, it’s much more straightforward. Different set of problems though, sorry to not being of much help
Well, it is always good to hear what is the workflow of others. Because it is actually most shitty part on being freelancer - spending tons of time on sometimes pretty banal questions or inventing ways which were invented a thousand times .) So thanks anyway - I appreciate your wilingness to share. And maybe it will help sometime in the future in different circumstances .)