Anghenfil
12-24-2009, 06:14 AM
I've run into a troubling issue with Maya 2009's Rasterized Rapid Motion. On our render farm running from the linux command line, Rapid Motion produces white dots and smears on the frames.
We have occasionally gotten this error to occur on our workstation computers as well, but mostly when running render.exe from the windows command line. Rendering inside Maya batch or the viewport does not (usually) produce this error. Obviously, the next test for us will be to try batch and viewport renders on the farm to compare, but with the holidays we are indisposed.
On the left is the error, the right side is rendered correctly.
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/9800/example1.png
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/4171/example2.png
http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/6694/example3.png
Note that in these examples, the file and the version of Maya are identical. The right side comes from the farm, the left side is from my laptop.
Here is what we currently know about this problem:
1. It only occurs in the Rasterizer with rapid motion. Putting it on Scanline (standard "Production" Motion blur) fixes the problem, but results in far longer render times for a grainier blur.
2. It doesn't happen all the time. There was a Rasterized scene on the farm where the error did not occur. Rarely, we have been able to get the error to happen on our workstation computers from batch or viewport, but usually it occurs strictly from the command line.
3. It usually, but not always, occurs in areas of frames with a lot of blur. The white artifacts appear to have affinity for the edges of objects in some cases, but again, not always. I can occasionally find little dots of white in relatively still areas in the middle of objects.
4. The dots can appear on any object in the scene, usually during a camera move, but it appears most often on characters and other moving objects.
5. The dots are sometimes frame-consistent, meaning you can render the frame again and have the dots come out the same way. This does not always hold true: Sometimes the dots are slightly different (larger, smaller, a few missing or added). Each computer that we've tested on has a particular pattern of dots that it "prefers" on a given frame, and will either produce that exact same set of dots or a slight variation. The preferred pattern tends to be different from computer to computer.
6. The dots are random from frame to frame, meaning they affect different areas of the object through time, resulting in a "sparkling" effect when the frames are played back.
Has anyone ever seen this error? Any ideas or hypotheses of what might be going on?
We have occasionally gotten this error to occur on our workstation computers as well, but mostly when running render.exe from the windows command line. Rendering inside Maya batch or the viewport does not (usually) produce this error. Obviously, the next test for us will be to try batch and viewport renders on the farm to compare, but with the holidays we are indisposed.
On the left is the error, the right side is rendered correctly.
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/9800/example1.png
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/4171/example2.png
http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/6694/example3.png
Note that in these examples, the file and the version of Maya are identical. The right side comes from the farm, the left side is from my laptop.
Here is what we currently know about this problem:
1. It only occurs in the Rasterizer with rapid motion. Putting it on Scanline (standard "Production" Motion blur) fixes the problem, but results in far longer render times for a grainier blur.
2. It doesn't happen all the time. There was a Rasterized scene on the farm where the error did not occur. Rarely, we have been able to get the error to happen on our workstation computers from batch or viewport, but usually it occurs strictly from the command line.
3. It usually, but not always, occurs in areas of frames with a lot of blur. The white artifacts appear to have affinity for the edges of objects in some cases, but again, not always. I can occasionally find little dots of white in relatively still areas in the middle of objects.
4. The dots can appear on any object in the scene, usually during a camera move, but it appears most often on characters and other moving objects.
5. The dots are sometimes frame-consistent, meaning you can render the frame again and have the dots come out the same way. This does not always hold true: Sometimes the dots are slightly different (larger, smaller, a few missing or added). Each computer that we've tested on has a particular pattern of dots that it "prefers" on a given frame, and will either produce that exact same set of dots or a slight variation. The preferred pattern tends to be different from computer to computer.
6. The dots are random from frame to frame, meaning they affect different areas of the object through time, resulting in a "sparkling" effect when the frames are played back.
Has anyone ever seen this error? Any ideas or hypotheses of what might be going on?