I have a Naid sim that I did and I PRT’ed it. When I render it it plays back all stuttery as if its the wrong frame rate. But I checked my frame rate across the boards and they all match (30 fps). Has anyone ran into this before at all? Thanks.
More data, I Xmeshed the prt and it played back fine. all I did for the particle prt was offset the timing by 200 frames, no time remapping. But as soon as I offset it, it went into stutterville…
Perhaps a video, or a sample scene would help explain the problem.
Ok, Here is a clip in all it’s glory… I tried offsetting all the animation of the scene so as to know mess with any timing in the prt and it looks like I still get a stutter. I have the camera linked to a dummy, could this be a possible cause?
Are you using any of the retiming features in Krakatoa to change the playback speed? The playback graph can be used to make files play back “slower” than 1 frame of PRT per frame of rendering, but this can make bizarre motion artifacts when it switched between the “nearest” file to load from.
If you aren’t doing that and are just loading a sequence of PRT files without doing anything fancy then I’m as confused as you are. If you have your PRT Loader in the viewport and scrub the timeslider (use the time configuration dialog to turn off “realtime” so that it doesn’t skip frames) does it jerk like that? Does it have stuttery playback if you make a new camera that isn’t animated?
If non of the things I mentioned turn up any clues you should submit a few of your PRT files to us via a support ticket (support AT thinkboxsoftware DOT com). Preferably any two frames that are adjacent to the jerkiness as well as the scene with the camera, lights & PRT Loader. I’ll take a look into it for you.
First thing I noticed while stepping through the video is that it has a very consistent problem - after every 4 frames, the 5th frame is the same as the 4th, while your animated camera keeps on moving.
A PRT Loader without any fancy retiming controls enabled (as Darcy described them) would load every frame it finds on disk (in fact, it has a field that shows exactly what file it is supposed to load).
So my first suspicion would be that when Naiad saved the PRT files, it somehow extended 24 fps into 30 by saving a held 5th frame after every 4 frames. I am not a Naiad user so I am not sure if that even makes any sense, but if you want to debug the problem, I would suggest the following:
*Create a PRT Loader and set it to Object Color RED.
*Pick exactly the 4th frame of your sequence and set it to “Load Single Frame Only”. This will show the 4th frame on every frame, regardless of the scene time.
*Clone the PRT Loader as a Copy and set its color to BLUE.
*Remove the PRT frame and pick the fifth frame of the sequence.
At this point, you should have two distinct offset point clouds, one RED and one BLUE.
If you see only the one overlapping perfectly the other, then the 4th and 5th frames on disk have the same content and it would be Naiad’s fault and not the PRT Loader’s.
You can also look at the PRT file sizes on disk and see if the file size is about the same on every 5th frame when compared to the previous frame…