AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Alembic support

please help us

we simulate tree growing like sim in houdini and exported as .abc
its fine when test inside maya and arnold
but
when we submit maya file to the deadline the final frame of cache only rendering
and one more
it wont pickup maya referenced file either
production is already badly late…!!! :cry: :cry:

I’m sure others can reply here with much better advice, but I do have a few troubleshooting ideas you could try (if you haven’t already tried them)

When I run into weird problems like this at the school where I work, the first thing I do is import all .ma (or.mb) references and Save As to make a new file. I find if references have problems in them, they make renders fail…so I import them. Then I use the File Path Editor to check for file paths… or just manually look at nodes and make sure everything is pathed correctly.

If you are using Arnold, Renderman or Vray to render with, try to bake out the Maya scene file as a series of .ASS files (Arnold), .RIB files (Renderman) {mel command = rman genrib; } or .VRSCENE files (Vray) {if VRSCENE make sure it is set to make one file per frame}… then render THAT with Deadline. Maybe it will bypass mayabatch difficulties.

At the very least, these ideas should give you a better clue what’s going wrong.

My 2 cents.

My guess is going to be that either the alembic file is in a location that the render farm either cant mount, because the paths are not mapped in the repository options; or that the user that the slave is run by doesnt have permissions to access; or the file lives locally on the test machine, and none of the farm machines can access it.

if its non of these, can you post the render log?

CHeers
Kym

Referenced scene files often won’t work in a cross platform path context. We use dirmap to tell Maya to re-map but it doesn’t always work for all plugins (alembic is a know problem plugin).

You can often get around this by using a relative path for any problematic assets (in this case the ABC file), but it will need to be relative to the main Maya file, and to be safe I would flatten the file.

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