mr Proxies disappearing or glitching on network render

[John Shulters]

Hey all,

 

Got a stumpper I can't figure out. When I set up a network rendered animation with backburner, my other render nodes will sometimes render frames that have random mental ray proxy objects (typically trees, shrubs, cars, or people) missing from the frame, or with solid colors (like a MatID pass) instead of properly textured. Obviously, this leads to pretty horrible flickering of my entourage objects, and I have to go frame by frame to find the errors, delete the frames, and re-render with my main workstation. I've tried all the normal fixes for mr errors (especially with proxies) like turning scanline on or off, BSP vs BSP2, geometry caching on or off, placeholder objects on or off. These errors are not consistent, appear randomly, and are difficult to reproduce the same way every time. It also usually only happens when the camera is high above the scene...when it gets closer to the objects, the problem tends to go away. Anyone have any ideas? I'm using max 2011 64bit on Windows Vista systems.

 

Thanks! John.

[Justin Hunt]

Have you compared the frames to the render log to see which machine rendered which frame? Might point out which machine isn't picking you the proxies and textures.

 

jhv

[John Shulters]

Have you compared the frames to the render log to see which machine rendered which frame? Might point out which machine isn't picking you the proxies and textures.

 

jhv

 

I have, and again it's fairly random. The errors are always on the render nodes, never my main workstation (which is also part of the network render). Sometimes they will render a frame just fine, but many times not. Again, it seems to only exhibit the error when the camera is a ways from the scene (e.g. descending from an overhead aerial view), and once it gets up close and personal, all the proxies behave as they should. I assume it has something to do with those machines not loading the .mib files correctly over the network at render time, but I'd think it would error out completely and not render the frame rather than render a beautiful frame that just happens to be missing a couple cars and tree here and there. I thought it might have something to do with the vertex colors (with some Color Correction maps applied) on the tree proxies (made from Onyx trees), but since axyz design) cars were disappearing too that theory is out the window.

[Justin Hunt]

If you apply a material override, do they still dissapear? If not then I dont think its a shader issue.

 

Proxies are loaded and unloaded as the bucket needs them, try different bucket sizes to see if that has any effect.

 

These are just thoughts, I dont know what the real issue is.

 

jhv

[John Shulters]

Those are worthy items to check, especially the buckets since I just recently started rendering with 24px buckets instead of 48. I'll try those fixes when I have some extra render time, and I'll let ya know the results. Thanks!

[R.Stewart]

Wow coincidence, I just got on to post a thread about the exact same thing. I'm getting the flickering with proxies of little plants that are at a bit of a distance. No flickering up close. But, I do have road lines that are flickering and they're not proxies. I've just got the one computer so I don't think it's a farming issue.

 

If you find out what the issue is please let me know it's looks horrible.

 

Cheers,

 

Richard

[R.Stewart]

Hey John I've solved the problem. It was to do with the samples per pixel settings. I just changed the minimum to 16 and the maximum to 64. It's taking longer to render (from 1.5 min per frame to 2.5 min per frame) but well worth it if you have time to wait. I hope it works for you too mate.

 

Richard

[John Shulters]

Well, I can't comment on whether the higher AA settings would have solve the problems on my machines as well (thought my deadlines are so razor thin I couldn't afford that increase in render time as a viable solution), but I did take the suggestion of bucket size. I had read somewhere that decreasing the size (which I did to 24) would help render times on multicore machines by being more efficient, but I went back to the default 48 size on a recent project that used all the same entourage elements and I didn't have a single instance of weird colors or disappearance of proxy objects. I was getting really horrible results and flickering on thin objects like parking lot striping when the camera was far from the objects, so I rendered those in a separate pass at 4/64 AA settings (instead of my usual 1/16) and just comp'd them on top (luckily I didn't have any objects occluding the striping!). I'd love to have the time and machine power to render everything in HD with high AA sampling, but that's just not possible right now. Thanks for everyone chiming in!

 

John