A&D Material / Contour Shader - crashing

[mikedeerf]

I'm working on creating a set of NPR materials I can use for site plans at the sketch plan level. While running test renders on my sample scene (a single street clock object on a single shadow/matte plane),

I'm finding that I can't get contour lines to work with the MR A&D material. It works fine with Standard, Architectural, and Mental Ray material types.

 

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Am I just missing something obvious? Attached are two images - the first is a Mental Ray material with the contours I'm looking for. The second is an A&D material with the ambient occlusion I'd like to add. I'm just using the "Low" FG preset (0.4, 150, 30, 0 bounces, 5 trace depth). The lighting is a MR daylight system.

 

The crashes happen after I click "enable" on the contours under the camera effects rollout. (i.e. I can render the 2nd image. Then I change absolutely nothing except clicking "enable," and Viz quits without warning during the next render attempt.)

[AJLynn]

That seems like an overly complicated way to do this. Why not:

 

-Use the A&D material with the FG

-Use Override Material to do an AO pass

-Use Override Material to do a Contour pass

-Composite in Photoshop

 

But anyway, I just tried A&D+Contours in Viz08, by putting Simple Contour in the mental ray Connection of a few A&D shaders and doing a simple Sun+Sky+FG render with Contour turned on. It worked. See attached. Some of the materials have A&D AO.

 

Maybe you could give more details to help replicate the problem?

[mikedeerf]

Well, I was just trying to cut out one extra step and avoid the Photoshop work. (Photoshop's always involved in a final product, but my thought was to have a faster workflow so we can start using 3D earlier in the project design process)

 

Thanks for running that test; since you had success, I kept playing with the file at home. After a ton of experimenting, it appears the problem is the "fast interpolate" switch under "main material parameters">>Reflection rollout.

That was turned on in whatever preset I had used as a starting point.

 

When I turn it off, it works just fine. Weird.

 

Thanks again

[mikedeerf]

Another thing I'm enjoying about doing it in one step is getting bump mapping and contour lines to interact with each other.

I can't see how to have some materials suggest masonry and others be pure matte with a material override. I think I'd need a separate masonry contour pass and another non-masonry material pass, right?

 

the attached pic gives an idea of what I'm trying to say (obviously I'm thinking for brick walls, but the clock is what I have handy)