Hi there, We've been having major issues trying to get ornatrix to render with any semblance of reliablity on our render farm. We are using Orantrix 1.2.6.11444 and Redshift 2.5.22. Our setup uses shotgun and becuase of that we are using referenced models. The geomtry with the hair on it is blendshaped onto another piece of geo that has an alembic cache.
I have searched to see if we can find any solutions but we are having nothing but problems ranging from hair flickering randomly, to hair not rendering on certain geometry at all. I read that for render farms you need to make sure that the remember root positions for both the Guides from Mesh and Hair from Guids nodes are off, then you do a single frame render and then you enable the remember root positions on both nodes. We also have our workstations and nodes set to DG. None of this seems to work.
The baffling thing is, the outcome is completelely ramdom. Sometimes the hair is on the objects, sometimes it's on but flickering, sometimes its off to the side of the object for a few frames then disappears then sometimes it just doesn't render at all. Sometimes it renders relatively reliably for certain objects (but sometimes not!). Its completely unpredictable and utterly baffling. None of us in our company can work out what is going on. It appears renders fine locally in the renderview.
I wonder has anyone come across similar problems? I've done my best to search the forums but the closest I could find was the render frame then enable remember root positions tip. Caching for us either crashes maya or even if it does cache on smaller hair counts, it doesn't help on the farm. Clicking remember root positions also increases the maya file to much larger sizes, which is understandable but saving the files can take up to 10 mins, same with loading. Are we missing something? Thanks a mill, hope someone can shed some light on this, we're dangeroulsy close to not being able to deliver a job because of this. Cormac |
| Hi Cormac, Sorry for all the inconvenience you are experiencing. I see you are using Ornatrix 1.2.6, current version is 1.2.9 which solve a few issues regarding Redshift reported by other users, including the caching problem and other things related to flickering. We've been working very close with Redshift developers (Specially Nicolas) to ensure everything it's working as it should, they have included several fixes in the latest weeks, including RS 2.5.24 (Which I recommend installing). Can you please install our latest Ox stable build give another try? If you are still having problem I'll be glad to take a look into your scene and address the problem directly. If you can reproduce any bug in a simpler scene would be very helpful. PS: Backup your files before saving with the latest Ox version. Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.) |
| Thanks for the reply Jeordanis, much appreciated. I have updated both Ornatrix and Redshift but it doesn't seem to have fixed it. I wish I could send you the scene but its a commercial and it's in the shotgun system referencing various files. Its a tricky one to package up. I'll keep investigating in the mean time, i'll see if I can find some spare time to package something up but it might be next week at this point. |
| That's strange. I can verify that at least the problems when creating hair cache and rendering have been solved, other users have been reported good results too. I'm using the latest RS version, latest Ox version and Maya 2017.4. Would be better if you can reproduce this problem with a simple scene using a sphere or plane, complicated scenes are more difficult. Another thing you can try is, if you are using HairClustering node turn ON Remember Clusters and Use UVs. Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.) |
| Hi Jeordanis, I have finally gotten around to packing up a scene for you to look at. We've stripped it down to the bare minimum, in this case its an animated puppy character with just its skin and hair no other details. Every time we render it we get a different result. We have tried every possible combination of things we can think of. Sometimes if we render the same frames again with no change in the scene we get a different result. We suspect it is either the lenght node or the surface comb node that is doing the damage. We had a more elaborate comb on it and it was worse now its simplified to a single angle but its still giving big problems.
Please let me know where is the best place to upload the file as it is quite large 200mb+ compressed zip, perhaps we can continue this over email and use we-transfer? thanks so much, I hope you can help. We haven't been able to deliver the job properly because of this and we have many more in the campaign to deliver so it is essential we find a solution quickly. |
| Hello Mario, Please send me the scene to Jeordanis.F@Ephere.com via We-Transfer. Would be good to have the scene as clean as possible, with only the problematic objects. "We suspect it is either the lenght node or the surface comb node that is doing the damage."
Sounds like a bug we had with the Comb node, but we fixed this a few months back. Can you try rendering without this node and another test without HairClustering?
Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.) |
| Hi Jeordanis, Mario is away on hol so this is Cormac using his account :) I've just sent you the files and an email to accompany. We aren't using Hair Clusters in this version and our verions of Redshift are 2.5.24 and ornatrix is 1.2.9.11815 so it should be up to date with your comb fixes if that's the case. I've explained more in the email anyway. Thanks so much for taking the time to have a look. Hopefully we can find a resolution. Cheers, Cormac |
| Thanks for the scene, Cormac. I'll take a look and get back to you ASAP. Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.) |
| No worries, looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Sent you an email regarding this aswell but for anyone reading, turning off the comb node seemed to stop the flickering in this instance. Not desirable but at least we have a lead in the mystery! We've had flicker in other instances using just a lenght node with a ramp plugged in too so its not the whole story. cheers, Cormac |
| Hey man, quick question while you're looking at the scene. I'm trying to render the same scene out in Arnold just to narrow down possibilities that it could be redshift problem. We're running arnold 1.4.2.0 and ornatrix hair does not seem to render with it. We don't have the option to upgrade as we've switched to Redshift but we have some existing arnold licecnes and that's out latest version. Any thoughts? Cheers, Cormac |
| Hi Cormac, Solid Angle made some big internal changes in Arnold 5, we had to make some changes too to make Ornatrix work with Arnold 5, that's why it does not render with old Arnold versions. You can download and replace the Ox translator with the translator for version 4, this way you will be able to render the hair, but I don't know if that can bring any problems in the future. Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.) |
| Hi Mario, Cormac, Just to follow up here. The real problem with your scene is that there are no Sinks in the Comb node. Without sinks, Ornatrix will try to conform the guides to the deformation of the distribution mesh, this is why you are getting flickering. Draw some sinks on the surface of the model following the natural direction of the fur, this should fix the flickering issue. Mario, I haven't been able to reproduce the crash here, your models seems to be rendering fine using Redshift 2.5.24. Please give it another try and let me know. Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.) |
