When having maya batch checked, for submitting a maya job, we get different alembic frame caches rendered. i.e frame 20 may render alembic cache frame 5 - this happens very randomly. Even to the extent that if I have the same scene but lower the render settings it will render fine but if I increase the settings it will render the incorrect alembic for the frame. What I think happens is that the first frame renders on a slave and for the next frame it renders (say frame 20) but renders the alebmic from the previous frame rendered. This bug has been around for atleast 5 years but haven’t worried too much about it as it didn’t happen often. Now what we’re rendering with REDShift (previously Vray) it happens far too often. It just so happened we had one computer that conistently produced the same render error and by turing off maya batch all render well. This computer is setup the same as the other computers.
We’ve had this issue (or at least a similar one) with Redshift/Maya as well. There were a few things that helped, like modifying the MayaBatch Deadline plugin to reload scenes between frames and lots of other hacks. At the end of the day, it was a sporadic issue that was hard to error-check, and our hacks only really served to minimise the problem.
Long story short, we changed our caching method away from ABC, and have not had any issues since. Another thing that swung is in this direction was the complete unwillingness of Maya’s ABC plugin to repath caches (we linked them to asset meshes, not simply referenced them in).
Not sure if this helps you in any way, but at least you’re not completely alone with your troubles
We actually just went back to Geo caches (Maya .mcx files). Since the caching and importing process is invisible to artists, it was a pretty straight forward swap. If your artists are manually submitting (and using) caches, however, I think you’ll find Geo caches to be a bit of a pain. Or not, who knows
Things to consider:
In most cases (but not all), .mcx files are significantly larger in size than .abc files
Maya needs a mesh to link the cache vertex information to, unlike Alembics which can be “generated” based on the file contents if needed. This was actually perfect for us, since we were already doing the same with .abc files, but this is not necessarily everyone’s workflow
For that reason, you most likely want to have an Anim version of your asset, which gets animated and is used to generate the cache. Then a companion Render version of the same asset (just minus the rig, sanitised transforms, etc) is linked to the cache data and preferably stored as an intermediary Cache (.mb) file. This is the file you should be referencing downstream for Lighting or whatever, in this particular scenario
Hopefully at least some of this made sense. Every studio is different though, so what’s working well for us might not be the right choice for you, etc.
