mental ray: Optimize Non-animated Display Visibility

[nojjy]

Thanks for the tip. That would have come in handy about two days ago during an insane one day freelance job, but better late than never.

j

[djx]

Maybe Im doing something wrong, but here's whats happening.

Objects not part of a heirarchy with animated visibility dont work correctly unless I clear the "Optimize Non-animated Display Visibility" flag. If I dont, then the will animate from invisible to visible, but not the other way. Works fine with the flag cleared.

However, in practice, I almost always have some kind of heirarchy with groups of objects. I key the visibility on the group node, not on the individual objects. In this case clearing the "Optimize Non-animated Display Visibility" flag causes the render to ignore the group animated visibility completely - groups always visible.

The obvious workaround is to transfer my visibility animation to the lowest transform nodes, but thats close to crazy with a complex model.

Have I missed some extra step?

(I know there is a alias knowlege-base article dealing with this subject - but Im not a platinum or silver member, so I cant see it)

[askaniblue]

I have a problem along these lines. I turned off Optimize Non-animated Display Visibility (or rather Prune Invisable Parts, as its been renamed) and the invisable things seem to be turning invisable as they should. The problem is, all of my shadows have gone nuts. The shadows of the invisable objects as very visable still, and I've gotten some wonky strips of shadows on some objects that I can't explain.

Does anyone have an idea? (I'd also settle for the address of the person that thought defaultly shutting off our ability to animate visability in MR was a good idea. ^^)

[NEO^AMiGA]

Working with the exact same problem in 7.0er... Any good solution to it yet bro?



Maybe Im doing something wrong, but here's whats happening.

Objects not part of a heirarchy with animated visibility dont work correctly unless I clear the "Optimize Non-animated Display Visibility" flag. If I dont, then the will animate from invisible to visible, but not the other way. Works fine with the flag cleared.

However, in practice, I almost always have some kind of heirarchy with groups of objects. I key the visibility on the group node, not on the individual objects. In this case clearing the "Optimize Non-animated Display Visibility" flag causes the render to ignore the group animated visibility completely - groups always visible.

The obvious workaround is to transfer my visibility animation to the lowest transform nodes, but thats close to crazy with a complex model.

Have I missed some extra step?

(I know there is a alias knowlege-base article dealing with this subject - but Im not a platinum or silver member, so I cant see it)

[djx]

A coincidence you should ask this now, because I have been animating visibility in some m7-mray scenes this past week. And my renders all worked correctly. At first I thought "they must have fixed the problem in m7". But then I realized that I am now using a render-manager application (smedge) to do my rendering and it launches each frame as a new task, rather than one sequence. (I havent had time to go back and test it the old way though.)

[NEO^AMiGA]

Exactly... One could do this manually and sumbit a bunch of frames as a time and try to keep track of the animated visibility but it is so utterly lame that this isn't fixed to work properly. I have tried EVERYTHING... ANimated miHide, miVisible and regular visibility but no combination of that works when it is an animation that spans over a bunch of hundred frames and objects needs to be turned on and off at different places. Even if I animate this at the object at the bottom of the hiearchy it doesn't work as it should. After 48 hours of testing one gets kinda frustrated and pissed! =(((((((((( Why can't MR inherit the damn .visibility flag???

A coincidence you should ask this now, because I have been animating visibility in some m7-mray scenes this past week. And my renders all worked correctly. At first I thought "they must have fixed the problem in m7". But then I realized that I am now using a render-manager application (smedge) to do my rendering and it launches each frame as a new task, rather than one sequence. (I havent had time to go back and test it the old way though.)

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