Stumped with a Multiscatter problem

[danielsimmonds]

Hi Everyone,

Alright, so I'm stumped with this one. My setup is thus:

3ds Max Design 2013 64-bit, rendering with Mental Ray, using Multiscatter.

I have a multiscatter object, in this case a strip of grass, using a texture in the object colour slot. Looks great rendered on my machine. When trying to render with Distributed Bucket Rendering the buckets rendered on the other machine (set up identically) come out without that texture.

I have tried all sorts, from setting it to UNC paths, reinstalling multiscatter, replacing user paths on second machine. I'm starting to think this might be a bug as other multiscatter objects that don't use the object colour slot render just fine.

 

Any suggestions would be welcome.

 

Regards,

Daniel

[Wil Vaughn]

You have to have the actual object in the scene textured unhide it also, also check to see if you apllied material to scatter. I know you should not have to but sometimes it gets lost especially when proxy's are involved.

 

Let me know if this works.

[danielsimmonds]

Sadly that didn't do it. Imported the grass object and made sure all the textures were within my scene file, as well as any xref'd files. I've included an image of the problem. Dark area rendered by other machine, vegetation in back is also multiscatter, but not using object colour.

[Francisco Penaloza]

if that black area is from a render node, it may be is not reading the texture map, all your machines are Max 2013? same Multiscatter version?, also here we use Relinkbitmap script, it work way better than Max build in map path organizer, sometimes textures written with Caps or lower case make a difference.

how about memory?? is your render nose ok on memory?

[Wil Vaughn]

I have not had much luck rendering a single image with multiple machines. If I am doing an animation I like using one machine for say frame 1-50 and another for frames 50-100 and so on... Looking at the example, the gray color of the grass, what ever node rendered those buckets is missing the map or the original object is hidden in the scene. I have done this many times when hiding & unhiding geometry in a scene as I add things and do tests renderings, if I don't make sure the original object is not "unhidden" then I get the gray color no matter if a material is appplied and everything else looks good.

To sum up, check that node. I am almost 100% sure that is your problem, considering all machines have exact same software & plugs.

[RyderSK]

Object color is applied to multiscatter instance, and not to underlying geometry. The problem lies within how Multiscatter exports its information of nested map inside it's instance. Try putting the material into material editor, and instance it from there into multiscatter but leave the material in editor for 3dsMax to correctly export the texture.

 

What version of multiscatter are you using ? Running multiscatter in network gave me many headaches too.

[danielsimmonds]

Alright, so I've tried a number of suggestions with no luck. But I think I've got it worked down to the problem being with the MultiScatterTexture node. I tried a few combinations of settings with that node and all of them gave the same bad result, but disconnect it and presto, all green grass.

I'm using multiscatter version : 1.1.09c

Also, the render node has plenty of memory and a very decent processor.

 

If someone else could confirm this, it would be nice to know its not just me.

 

Thanks for the suggestions too.

[cg_Butler]

Are you using bitmaps or just the multiscatter texture? It seems to me that your render nodes can't access the bitmaps and xrefs so you need to make sure all your paths for bitmaps and xrefs are UNC and not on mapped drives.

 

Example.

 

If it's this on your local machine :- S:\\jobname\bitmaps\grasstexture.jpg

 

Change it to this :- \\computername\jobname\bitmaps\grasstexture.jpg

 

The lower is a UNC path that all machines on the network will be able to find. Having a drive mapped like S: mean you have to have that drive mappes as S: on ALL machines on your network. In Max you can change all paths to UNC ones using the file explorer.

[Sketchrender]

It could be as simple as the asset tracker.

2013 may say found , but it should say OK.

So check all the links .

[Wil Vaughn]

I had the "a" vs. for a while, upgraded to the 1.1.09d and have had literaly zero issues. It works so much better, scenes with 7+mil poly plus 2+ scatter objects, orbiting & operations are smooth.

 

Just saying. Maybe upgrade?

[danielsimmonds]

Lets see, I've worked through a bunch of your suggestions and still no dice. Really thinking this is an actual problem.

Upgraded multiscatter to 1.1.10

Checked assets and even went as far as copying the particular texture locally. But also, the MultiScatterTexture texture node even without an external texture has problems and doesn't render correctly over the Distributed Bucket Rendering. Trying it out on a new scene, just a plane, with a cube and a MultiScatterTexture on the diffuse of a standard material (basic basic stuff) it gave a bunch of grey buckets and a bunch of coloured ones.

Incidentally, everything already was as UNC paths.

I'm out of ideas and have also posted on the support forum for multiscatter, nothing there as of this time though.

 

Thank you all again for your suggestions.

 

Cheers,

Daniel

[cg_Butler]

I think perhaps the Multitexture dlo is the issue. This either needs to be local on all machines or in a plugin "pool" where you copy all your plugins so that all network machines can use them. I suggest copying it locally in to the plugins folder in your 3dsmax installation, on the machine thats having problems and see if that's your answer. Multiscatter is clearly working, in that the geometry is there, but the miltitexture is a separate .dlo.

 

Give that a bash and let us know!

[Wil Vaughn]

The old when in doubt, just restart the machine... Maybe as a last hope effort,,, uninstall everything from that node, max and vray included, and see if that does anything.

Like Andy says, it is clearly working, just not everything.

[danielsimmonds]

Addressing the plugin dlo; I've now even tried copying it directly from my machine to the other machine, just in case it hadn't installed correctly, same for the mental ray and vray parts of the plugin.

 

I have tried "turning it off and on again" and I'm sure that its plugged in.

 

Short of kicking it sharply in the processor... I might have to give up on this one.