maya 2013 mental ray Camera Change

Deadline
1

Hey there,

for some reason Maya 2013 jobs on deadline 5 keeps randomly changing camera every 100 or so frames. seems random and on all slaves.

Any chance this is a known thing?

Thanks

2

We haven’t heard of this problem before. Could you post a log from a frame that rendered with the correct camera and one that rendered with the wrong camera? We can compare them to see if anything stands out that would explain the problem.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

I’ll try and get those for you asap
All other passes render fine, it’s just the beauty with the projection camera that produces this error

4

Hi there,

actually the problem is not the render camera.

We are working with projected textures. The textures get projected from a separate projection cam which is static. The render cam does what it is supposed to do. Might be a bit hard to tell at first but if you look at the pic in the link you can see that the geometry stays where it is. The shape of the office furniture is in the same place. It seems like the projected texture is not being projected from the correct camera anymore.

animateme.me.uk/blog/wp-content/ … lem_01.jpg

The projection camera has no keyframes and the projected texture is a still not an image sequence.

The problem happens in the intervals the task is split up, i.e. frames 1 - 30 are fine 31 - 60 are wrong, 61 - 90 are fine again.
I assume something gets mixed up between render nodes.

Another thing is that when resubmitting the same job again without making any changes to the scene in maya it’ll be different frames that go wrong. And to make things even more fun :wink: it seems to be independent in terms of render nodes. i.e a blade that has rendered a sequence ok the first time might screw up the same task when resubmitting.

the two task reports are in the text files. Frame 1 - 10 produced good results, 11 - 20 are bad

thanks

_problem_01.jpg
_problem_01.jpg600×676 80.7 KB

11_20_bad.rtf (331 KB)
1_10_good.rtf (336 KB)

5

Thanks for the additional info and the logs. It looks like the problem is related to keeping Maya loaded between tasks. In the good log, Maya was launched initially, and in the bad log, it was already running. To workaround the problem, disable the “Use MayaBatch” option when you submit the job. This will result in Maya’s Render.exe command line renderer being used, and Maya will be launched at the start of each task.

One thing I noticed in the bad log as well was this message:

That doesn’t appear in the good log. However, I checked the melscript that was being run in both logs, and their identical, so I’m not sure what would cause the camera user data to go missing like that…

6

thanks a lot, will give that a try