disc area lights and render passes

[Remydrh]

Hmm , passes are an Autodesk implementation. Do you have access to a Standalone installation? I did but not anymore. I would always render an .mi file to see where the bug happened. Can you post an .mi file? Someone with Standalone can try and isolate it based on your reproduction.

[rlevene]

Hey David.

Yeah this is what I was not sure about regarding if it was an Autodesk or MI issue.

I have standalone at work so will try.

P.S. Do you ever sleep?!?! Seems no matter when someone posts something on here you always seems to answer really fast. Suppose it is only midnight in LA so not ridiculously late

Really appreciate your support on these forums.

Best,

Rich

[Remydrh]

What is this "sleep" you speak of?

I'm sort of a vampire when I'm between projects.

Yeah an .mi file is useful so everyone knows who to work with for the fix. Hotfix 2 took care of quite a few of my problems but a few still exist here and there. AD will accept fixes that aren't dangerous to integrate. But since this is marked as Critical I wonder if you couldn't request a patch from them if it's halting production.

[rlevene]

What is this "sleep" you speak of?

I'm sort of a vampire when I'm between projects.

Hehe. To be honest I had a really horrible dream last night. Guess it was more of a nightmare, but I was at FMX 2012 and they had changed the layout of the venue with different room names and locations and had changed the way the schedule is listed and made it impossible for me to find the presentation I wanted to see. I was really panicing that I was missing the presentation. Funny dreaming about work related stuff.

Just got into the studio and rendered the scene with standalone. Same issue.

Attached you can find the scene and .mi file.

Will get in contact with Autodesk again today.

I am wondering though why others have not mentioned this bug. David do you not use any light shaders on your lights with mr and do you use the native passes system?

I wonder if this is an issue with Corey's Mental Core. (will try now)

Best,

Richard

[rlevene]

Can confirm shadows render correctly with a light shader attached in passes when rendering with mentalCore.

[Remydrh]

I had a dream where I was trying to use the poly split tool to kill people. It wasn't working and I was angry. I reported it as a bug. But I have yet to have a "wireframe" dream.

We avoid area lights like the plague because they are expensive. Are more likely to use IBL for integration and FG. Lots of spotlights if necessary. Sorry, more specific: No, light shaders generally on a show. And usually a custom buffer pass. Although Corey's system is a good (superior) alternative to AD's for now if you don't have a developer.

If Mental Core is alright then it's AD's framebuffer shaders. If not then it's a mental ray bug possibly. Can state that in your report to Autodesk that you can reproduce it multiple ways. If they know where it is then it makes a fix faster. Sometimes you can be better at narrowing it down than they can and they appreciate that.

Can confirm shadows render correctly with a light shader attached in passes when rendering with mentalCore.

Then it's AD's framebuffers. Maybe they can generate a patch for you?

[rlevene]

Then it's AD's framebuffers. Maybe they can generate a patch for you?

Just updated the support case letting them know more these details and asking for a status update. Will wait and see what they say.

We avoid area lights like the plague because they are expensive. Are more likely to use IBL for integration and FG. Lots of spotlights if necessary. Sorry, more specific: No, light shaders generally on a show. And usually a custom buffer pass. Although Corey's system is a good (superior) alternative to AD's for now if you don't have a developer.

Thanks for the insight David. For us I think area lights with a light shader (normally an ies) are essential as you get the realistic light wrap around objects compared to using a traditional cg spot and making the light radius bigger. But we do not do animations but rather high res stills for advertising.

Thanks for your input.

Best,

Rich

[Remydrh]

But we do not do animations but rather high res stills for advertising.

Yeah, different world to a degree. I do use Builtin IBL (giant area light) but not a lot of the other unless I have a commercial or arch viz client. So that makes sense. Light wrap is accomplished in Nuke, if we're talking about the same thing.

I think the way rendering is going, Nvidia will be more and more interested in what it takes to render for beauty.

Hopefully they will be in touch soon. I was happy Hotfix 2 with the geo framebuffer fix was decently fast.

[rlevene]

Light wrap is accomplished in Nuke, if we're talking about the same thing.

Similar but different. I do not just mean wrap around the outer parts of objects.

Yeah I think for us Nvidia buying mental images was a good thing and iray would be the direction we would like to go. But at the moment it is not something we can think about using. Once it works with IPR in maya then we might use it more.

[Remydrh]

Once it works with IPR in maya then we might use it more.

Even iRay on the CPU (for VFX) is enticing if it offers motion blur and layered materials. This seems to be shocking even for some inside mi, but it's not really. The competition is already headed that way.

Autodesk doesn't use the correct API for Progressive/iRay with Maya. This is why it crashes. This is something AD would need to build into Maya. To say nothing of IPR+iRay/Progressive. I think originally Progressive was seen as a perfect marriage for IPR but AD never did anything with it. (Literally, nothing)

I'm hoping this will change. There was a tile artifact in Progressive that kept me from using it. But it has since been resolved. So now I have more reason to push AD to better interactive rendering. Distributed iRay/IPR would be killer (CPU or GPU)