3D Guy Needs Help

[yahooadam]

Well hes quite busy so he asked me to post for him

Basically, hes using Maya, and trying to render lots of frames, but apparently his batch renderer isn't working

here is the error he gets
7/10/2007

mental ray for Maya 7.0

mental ray: version 3.4.5.2, 06 July 2005

run time commands loadedWarning: line 1: Unrecognized node type for node '_spotLight1_mrLoc'; preserving node information during this session.

File read in 0 seconds.
Result: F:/3D Virtual Tours Bussiness/Jay-be Ski Bed Demo/scenes/Chapter7__868.mb

mental ray: got 8 satellite CPUs.

// mental ray for Maya: using rayhosts file F:/My Documents/maya/7.0/prefs//maya.rayhosts
spotlight 1 has a node off it called _spotLight1_mrLoc, that's where the problem is
when area lighting is off it renders but that's crucial
it works fine in the other 8 Scenes and they use the exact same lighting file
it appears to be to do with the area light setting on a spot light when using mental ray
Anyone got any ideas ?

[BAM!]

try delete the original area light or _spotLight1_mrLoc and recreate a new one. make sure you name it something else other than the original name.

or

render out two different passes, one with the area and the other with Spot. reason i suggest this is... if the scene is dense, that might be causing the mental ray to choke. i've choked mental ray before when it exceeded 1.7GB ram cache.

or

check your mental ray setting, make sure you optimize the mental ray BSP setting. settings vary scene by scene.

or

copy all the files from the remote drive to your local drive.

or

last but not least, export it out to a brand new scene. most likely will fix the problem but it's a pain in the rear end.

[BAM!]

oh and i forgot, if he has global illumination enabled in the scene. and if the photon emmition from that light is not set correctly... render will freeze like that. so double check with the steps of GI setting.

[3DGuy]

try delete the original area light or _spotLight1_mrLoc and recreate a new one. make sure you name it something else other than the original name.

I've managed to work around it, but still wondering whats causes it...

I tried to delete the lights and remake them from scratch and with different names..


render out two different passes, one with the area and the other with Spot. reason i suggest this is... if the scene is dense, that might be causing the mental ray to choke. i've choked mental ray before when it exceeded 1.7GB ram cache.

Scene isn't dense, no more than the other 8 scenes, because they are based on the same content only animated differently.

check your mental ray setting, make sure you optimize the mental ray BSP setting. settings vary scene by scene.

Not sure what you meant on this part. however its an exact copy of the previous scene only aniamted differently so ever setting except camera movememnt and several objects being animated is identical.


copy all the files from the remote drive to your local drive.

The directory used is the one that always has been used consistantly and the maya directories are targeted here. I tried it out of curiosity but didnt make a difference :(


last but not least, export it out to a brand new scene. most likely will fix the problem but it's a pain in the rear end.

This was the first thing i tried and it didnt work. I know it has solved a slightly corrupt scene before by importing it into a new one...But not this time. :(


oh and i forgot, if he has global illumination enabled in the scene. and if the photon emmition from that light is not set correctly... render will freeze like that. so double check with the steps of GI setting.

Yes the scene uses global illumination but not final gather. As stated earlier its the exact same lighting used in all 7-8 scenes. I set up the lights then exported as a separate file to make sure it was consistant. So the settings for all scenes are identical as the aniamtion flows smoothly between all the chaptors. They were just needed separatly for the dvd setup.

So i'm still confused as to how and why iut happened lo. Not a clue on this one...

Cheers for the help anyhow. :)

[BAM!]

glad you worked it out. so what did you do differently that fixed it anyway.

[3DGuy]

glad you worked it out. so what did you do differently that fixed it anyway.

I couldnt get it fixed... :( Still not a clue... lol I've been using maya 4-5 years now and i'm lost with this one....

I basically had to switch from mental ray over to software - Match up the lighting as best i could in the hour or so i could spare the time for it.

As i got 100 Frames rendered out ok what i did was re-render those on software till the end. Then Premiere edited a cross disolve over those 100 frames to blend it in as best i could with the short time frame i had.

Temp crude fix but i showed a few non 3D type people and they didnt see it. So its ok ish lol