particle cache

Deadline
1

I am having problems with deadline bringing in particle cache properly. I am using an nParticle system that has been fully cached which is using a fluid system as a texture, also cached. Rendering locally on my system is fine. Deadline is giving me issues. Sometimes it will load the particle placement but not size, the fluid colour is always hotter than when rendered locally, and I am getting these black holes that the particles seem to pass through. The following pictures show the issue. I have tried using maya batch vs not, set the project directory to a couple different places, set the full line path to the cache files inside the maya file… I am at a loss. The frames are not quick to render, understandably since there are lots of particles going on, so I really need this to run on the render farm.

rendered on a local machine:

flame_local_001.jpg
flame_local_001.jpg960×540 54.4 KB

rendered on the render farm:

flame_farm_001.jpg
flame_farm_001.jpg960×540 54.3 KB

2

Hi Scott,

Do you have the render log from the job that produced flame_farm_001.jpg and had the “Use MayaBatch” option disabled? This will show the command line arguments that Deadline is passing to Render.exe to render this frame. What I would like you to try is to use these same command line arguments and launch Render.exe from a command prompt on the same render node that produced this bad frame. We are looking to see if the same problem occurs when Deadline has been removed from the equation, because Deadline doesn’t explicitly control how Maya loads in cached particles (that’s all handled by Maya internally).

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

Here’s the log file. I’ve also attached a frame a bit farther down the sequence and you can see more black spots. It’s like the particles’ transparency/lifespan are cycling in these spaces, but at the same time the particles continue animate onward. In the scene they go all the way to the end of the volume(screen top right) before dying.

Render20_00112_20101201131443.logReport (37.8 KB)

flame_farm_002.jpg
flame_farm_002.jpg960×540 81.4 KB

4

Thanks for the log. Here is the command that Deadline is running:

"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2010\bin\Render.exe" -r mr -v 5  -rt 4 -aml -x 1280 -y 720 -ard 1.77699995 -rl flameball_orig_rdr  -s 432 -e 432 -b 1 -rd "//PROJ/proj/_client/CREAM/BFF/SEG/BFF101_SQA/BFF101_SQA_120_010/input/3d_renders/v007" -im "<Scene>/<RenderLayer>/<RenderLayer>" -proj "//PROJ/proj/_client/CREAM/BFF/SEG/BFF101_SQA/BFF101_SQA_120_010/prod/3d_animation/previz"  "C:\Documents and Settings\render\Local Settings\Application Data\Prime Focus\Deadline\slave\jobsData\fire_v019e.mb"

Go to the machine that this rendered on through Deadline (Render20), open a command prompt, and run this same command to see if the problem still occurs. You probably want to copy the scene file to the machine first and change its path in the command line above accordingly.

Also, I’m seeing warnings in the log being printed out by Maya:

Not sure if these are related to the problem, but I thought I would point them out just in case you know what they mean.

Cheers,

  • Ryan