Vray Qube and Layer Overrides

[haich11]

Hi,

Having some strange issues with Maya when rendering using Vray with overrides.

e.g. I have a simple file with 2 render layers (layer1 and layer2). If I submit that job via qube using the Maya Batchrender (vray) everything renders as expected.

If I then add a layer override to one of the render layers to render only frames 5-10 render times go up significantly (instead of down as it's rendering less frames).

It looks like what's happening is:

Frame 1 renders - layer1 - frame 1 and layer2 - frame1
Frame 2 renders - layer1 - frame 2 + 1 (again) + layer2 - frame 2
Frame 3 renders - layer1 - frame 3 + 2 and 1 (again) + layer2 - frame 3
Frame 3 renders - layer1 - frame 4 + 3, 2 and 1 (again) + layer2 - frame 4
etc etc

So by the time your rendering frame 10 it's rendering layer1 10 times! It just gets exponentially worse and worse.

I'm sure this can't be right or that I'm missing a checkbox/button?

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Thanks,
Chris

[jburk]

This rings a bell in the back of my head; I think I saw a case in our helpdesk about 6 months ago where framerange overrides in the layers caused odd behavior. 

What versions of Qube and the QubeGUI are you running?  This may be better supported in later versions.

I think another work-around might be to render the layers that have framerange overrides in separate jobs.

[haich11]

We're up to date with Qube (5.5-2), GUI 5.5.3
Maya 2009
Up to date with latest Vray for Maya

Pretty sure it's just overrides on framerange as we've also tested it using an override on render passes and that seems to work as expected.

We using that workaround. Do you know if it's a Qube or a Vray thing?

Thanks.

[haich11]

Not ideal, but another workaround seems to be setting the 'Execution' to run as 'Chunks with n frames'.

i.e. if you were rendering frames 1-20, set 'Chunks with n frames' to 20 and put 1 processor on it.

Obviously means you can't render across multiple machines but at least means you can queue the job.

Any fix planned on this?

[jburk]

Can you generate the simplest possible scenefile that causes this problem to occur and post it? 

I'm thinking a lambert sphere on a plain with no lights, but with the layers set up to cause this problem to occur.

[haich11]

Hi, here's a test file along with the Stderr from frame 10 which shows you what it seems to be doing.

http://mainframe.co.uk/internal/people/chris/qubeVray.zip

[haich11]

As a side note Maya 2011 seems to behave slightly differently. It still does the same thing in terms of rendering the same frames multiple times for 1 of the layers but it also ignores the override completely from what we can see.