I’m experiencing consistent issues when rendering animations via Live Link from 3ds Max 2024 using V-Ray 7.20.08 to Chaos Vantage 3.1.0, and I’m hoping to confirm whether this is a known bug that is planned to be resolved.
When starting an animation render via Live Link, Vantage begins rendering normally and the denoiser performs its initial render, but the render never advances beyond rendering and saving the first frame. Vantage then remains idle on frame 0 indefinitely. Closing and reopening Vantage sometimes resolves the issue, but not reliably.
In cases where the animation does start rendering, all frames are saved over the same output file and the frame number does not increment. Filename tokens such as _####.exr are ignored, and Vantage appears to treat the animation as a still render, even though the timeline is moving forward in 3ds Max as each frame is rendering. Starting from from any other frame other than zero still has the same results.
The only consistent workaround I have found so far is to import the scene into a new 3ds Max file, switch the render engine to a non-Chaos renderer, allow Max to switch back to V-Ray GPU, reconnect Live Link to Vantage, render the output as PNG, and then revert back to EXR. After this reset, Live Link animation and frame numbering sometimes work correctly, although I may need to repeat this process multiple times.
Is anyone else experiencing this issue? I’m really hoping this will be addressed in the next hotfix, possibly in version 3.1.1???
Your issue sounds similar to this one, though in your case at least the first frame did render: Vantage no renderiza - Vantage :: Issues - Chaos Forum
Update 3.1.1 is released today, so it won’t contain a fix, but we will try to reproduce this issue and fix it for the next update. Thanks for reporting. As a workaround you could try rolling back to a previous update. We are yet unsure if the issue is caused by an update of Vantage or V-Ray.
I don’t think we ever supported parsing a “####” pattern, but we automatically generate a frame number suffix for offline renders. If the file name doesn’t include the suffix and overwrites each frame, this is a bug (maybe separate from the bug that prevents the animation from progressing).
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I think you’re right that these may be separate issues, as I’ve had Vantage remain idle on frame 0 a few times before. However, the frame index problem only started after updating V-Ray.
I did a quick test and downgraded V-Ray to 7.20.04, and it seems to be working normally again. One thing I noticed between the two versions is that when loading a large scene into Vantage, I don’t need to hide poly dense layers with V-Ray 7.20.08 to do the initial load, whereas I do with 7.20.04, otherwise vantage crashes (Probable due to the memory spike during loading into vram). Also, the new version doesn’t load the V-Ray frame buffer during the transfer.
I’m not sure if these differences in V-Ray versions are related to my frame index issue, but I thought it might be useful to highlight.
Quick update — the new version of Vantage 3.1.1 feels much smoother and snapper during live link and general use, and I’m not running into any of the issues noted before.
It looks like this may be related to the new version of V-Ray. Hopefully that helps point you in the right direction with the bug fix.
I’m not running into any of the issues noted before
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Hopefully that helps point you in the right direction with the bug fix.
This is a bit confusing. Are there issues (potentially in V-Ray) that still exist when using 3.1.1?
I’ve just installed V-Ray 7.20.08 and the issues are back. At least the first issue — the render never gets past the first frame — so I can’t confirm whether the frame indexing issue is still present.
When submitting a Live Link animation render, 3ds Max hangs and has to be closed via Task Manager. Reverting back to V-Ray 7.20.04 works like a charm. It could just be a stability issue with Live Link in 3ds Max and may have nothing to do with Vantage as this stays active throughout. Turning the denoiser off in vantages makes no difference.
I only tested one of my problem scenes, which consists of a tyFlow rock simulation and a number of high-poly assets and some displacement mods. It may have worked with a simpler scene, but I didn’t have time today to run extensive testing. Hopefully you’ll have some luck reproducing the issue on your end. Let me know if you need anything from me that could help.
Can you share some scene that reproduces the issue? It could be a simplified version of your “real” scene. If you don’t want to post a link here you could create a support ticket and tell me the ticket number: https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/requests/new