OK so I am basically using the “Ship.max” scene but with my own ship and rendering only the water with Mental Ray in 3dsmax 2016. I am rendering local because we are having issues with the plugin on the render farm ATM. The shot looks great in still previews, but when I render the sequence the quality degrades as the sequence progresses. I have a moving camera and I have moved and re-animated the camera movements since the simulation. You can see the quality is what I expect in the still render but in the sequence render there are render artifacts, and the water does not extend to the edge of the frame. Any ideas?
Hmmm, are the waves animating during the sequence? It’s possible that Mental Ray does not manage to update the Phoenix Ocean during sequence renders. Gotta test it here and I’ll get back to you.
They appear to be animated yes.
Hey,
Is is possible to send us the scene so we can check it out? We couldn’t reproduce the issue on our side.
Thank you,
The simulation cache file is quite large how can I send it? Is the simulation cache dependent on camera view? Could the problem be that I animated the camera pan and zoomed in after the simulation is complete?
Hey, this could be related, yes. It might be possible to do without the cache though - could you try if the problem reproduces if you enable Pure Ocean under the Rendering rollout?
Cheers!
I don’t see Pure Ocean as an option. Is that a VRAY feature?
Got it - you are using a scene from Phoenix 2. This is the legacy simulator which uses the fire/smoke grid solver for liquids. This simulator’s liquid solver hasn’t been touched in over 2 years, so it’s very likely that you’d have issues with it that aren’t even on our radar. If you start with the ship example from this page, you will save yourself a lot of headache: Chaos Docs
Cheers!