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Author Topic: Render Errors with Mental Ray  (Read 1535 times)

SozoDigital

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Render Errors with Mental Ray
« on: December 13, 2014, 04:45:29 PM »
Hi,

I'm getting the following errors when trying to render a scene with Forest Pro and Mental ray in  both Max 2012 and 2014 latest SP's:

MSG  0.0  error: Custom translation interface for mtl/tex '  ( Forest Geom )': Shader declaration "fs_geom3" not found.
MSG  0.0  error: Custom translation of instance 'Forest_grass': failed to translate the geometry shader.
MSG  0.0  error: Custom translation interface for mtl/tex '  ( Forest Geom )': Shader declaration "fs_geom3" not found.
MSG  0.0  error: Custom translation of instance 'Forest_rocks': failed to translate the geometry shader.
MSG  0.0  error: Custom translation interface for mtl/tex '  ( Forest Geom )': Shader declaration "fs_geom3" not found.
MSG  0.0  error: Custom translation of instance 'Forest_shrubFragments': failed to translate the geometry shader.

I found a thread with the same error and tried  un- and reinstalling Forest Pro to the respective directories multiple times using various installers from 4.12 to 4.16.  Mental Ray still refuses to render the Forest instances with the same old error across every scene I try to render. The same scenes render fine when using VRay, that's why I did not notice until now.

I have no idea what to look for/which files to manually place where to fix this, so help here would be much appreciated.

Kind regards,
FL

iToo

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Re: Render Errors with Mental Ray
« Reply #1 on: December 14, 2014, 08:55:33 AM »
For some reason Mental Ray cannot load the Forest shader. Please would check if the following files exist in your Max folder ?

<max dir>\mentalimages\shaders_autoload\mentalray\shaders\FShader3.dll
<max dir>\mentalimages\shaders_autoload\mentalray\include\FShader3.mi
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

SozoDigital

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Re: Render Errors with Mental Ray
« Reply #2 on: December 14, 2014, 10:07:48 AM »
Hi Carlos,

thank you very much for the speedy reply.

I had kinda deducted from the related threads that those where the files in question and did find them in the respective directories. Hence I was all the more clueless. I found the solution yesterday though, albeit a weird one.

Turns out puppet_shaders, which I had installed the latest versions of recently (beta), apparently directly or indirectly were the culprit. p_mix was creating an an error on Max start-up  which I disregarded since I don't use that. But that got me thinking that the error might interrupt a loading sequence, kinda like in Maya's Mel , when a script stops executing once it encounters an error. Anyways, whether or not that is the case I have no idea, but once I quoted the lines related to loading puppet_shaders out in the respective .mi file in the mental ray folder and restarted Max, Mental Ray once again rendered the Forest instances without a problem.

I'll have to roll back to an older version of puppet_shaders, it seems.

Can you provide any more insight on this from your understanding of how Max/Mental Ray work? I'm not as experienced with Max as I am with Maya, that's why I'm asking.

Cheers;

FL
« Last Edit: December 14, 2014, 10:17:37 AM by IO4825 »

iToo

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Re: Render Errors with Mental Ray
« Reply #3 on: December 14, 2014, 12:50:42 PM »
Hi, glad the problem is solved.

Unfortunately the details about how Mental Ray is implemented in Max is almost inexistent, even for third-party developers as us.
Many times, we had to solve Mental Ray problems just by trial and error. I must say that Autodesk is not much of help on this issue either.
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

SozoDigital

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Re: Render Errors with Mental Ray
« Reply #4 on: December 15, 2014, 11:46:06 AM »
That sounds just like the AD we all know. Gee!!

Thanks again for your speedy reponses.


Cheers!