AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Alembic breaks on job start [Deadline - Maya - Redshift]

Hey,
If we import an animated alembic or reference an animated alembic into a maya scene and send it to deadline it starts breaking immediately on render start.
Even in the maya scene that is still open on the machine that submitted the render the alembic animation instantly stops playing back in the maya viewport. The render image sequence shows a static object instead of an animated one with some pops between the start / end frame on random frames (sometimes no animation at all).
This only happens as soon as a slave picks up a frame! We rendered locally inside of maya / have opened multiple maya accessing the same alembic with no problem but as soon as a deadline slave picks up a frame it breaks in all open maya scenes that source the same alembic file.
The alembic file is accessible from all machines from a network location and not locally saved.

Maya 2018.4 (tried 2018.6, 2019.2)
Deadline 10.0.23.4 Release
Redshift 2.6.44
Windows 10 64bit

Thanks!

I don’t have any specific advice for your problem, it seems very strange, but I wanted to let you know that I’ve had plenty of Alembic+Redshift related issues in our pipeline too.

To the point where we have now stopped using Alembics and are using Geocaches instead. I suspect our main issue was linking the Alembics with a target mesh, trying to only use the vertex movement to drive an existing asset. I went through parts of the source code for the ABC plugin, and it’s pretty hacky in places (for instance not being able to re-path .abc files).

We generally got movement, but had lots of shader and geo visibility issues. On occasion we saw the render for a frame use the wrong Alembic frame, which we never understood fully.

Anyway, food for thought.

After more investigation: (For anyone having similar issues)
HDF5 Alembics work fine but OGAWA Alembics break due to remapping during rendering.

Scheduler Thread - Successfully mapped Y: to \someserver\projects

Either using HDF5 alembics work or just importing / referencing alembics from \someserver\projects instead of Y: works too so it doesnt remap during rendering

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