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Author Topic: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems  (Read 6086 times)

iToo

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Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« on: July 02, 2015, 01:44:27 PM »
Hi, we have uploaded Forest Pack Pro 4.4.1 to the User Panel. In this release should be fixed all rendering problems with Mental Ray and Max 2016.

If you had problems with v.4.4.0 and Mental Ray, please test the update and post your results here. Thanks.
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

SI2272

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Re: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« Reply #1 on: July 07, 2015, 05:33:52 PM »
Partial success - the stripped down model I sent does now work, but the original model still does not.  One of my render nodes gives the same error as before, and the other gets to 33.3% of Computing Final Gather Points and hangs (I am only testing two at the moment).  Sometimes it completes a frame eventually, and sometimes not.  I'm trying to narrow down exactly what's happening when so I can send another stripped down scene which still has problems, but I'm on leave for the rest of this week so it won't be until next week.

QJ4351

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Re: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« Reply #2 on: July 08, 2015, 01:08:56 AM »
Since installing the 4.4.1 update I've had a lot of problems.  When creating a scene with ForestPro The computer completely locks up and it has to be restarted via the power button.  This is the case on 2 separate machines.  Also, I'm trying to render Panos and unless the amount of vegetation is minimalized the machine locks up.  This happens regardless of the image quality settings.

iToo

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Re: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« Reply #3 on: July 08, 2015, 10:11:07 AM »
I'm sorry to know that there are problems yet. Please, do this:

1) Open Rendering->"Render Message Window".
2) Right click on the window and turn on "Show information messages", "Write messages to file".
3) Start render and send us the log file, or a screenshot if render doesn't progress.

As always, you can send us your problematic scenes to support@itoosoft.com.
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

LL4733

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Re: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« Reply #4 on: September 16, 2015, 01:31:53 PM »
After a long time of using max 2015 and the old 4.3.7 version, we have started testing with max 2016 and 4.4.1.
We are sorry to see that the network problems are still not gone. Sometimes the render works, sometimes it works after 2 or 3 tries from the network queue, sometimes it keeps crashing.
Are we the only ones who use FP + MR + network render? Noboby else has this problem?

iToo

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Re: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« Reply #5 on: September 16, 2015, 04:11:51 PM »
It's not any try to exculpate ourselves by this issue, but i must say that Mental Ray always was a pain for us. Not for the render engine itself, but for the poorly implementation and (inexistent) support in 3DS Max. For developers, we must solve the problems by trial error. Almost there is not documentation of how it's integrated in Max, useful logs or debugging tools... nothing.

I don't know what percentage of Max users work with Mental Ray, but from our stats, most of our customers prefer other engines (specially V-Ray). Sincerely, if i had to rewrite now our plugins from scratch, i would considere seriously to exclude MR from the supported engines.

Said that, please see my previous post about the logs and test scenes. Any help that may help us to reproduce this problem will be welcome.

Thanks,
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

LL4733

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Re: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« Reply #6 on: November 02, 2015, 06:27:08 PM »
Any progress on this matter?
Nobody else experiences this problem too?

kind regards,

SI2272

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Re: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« Reply #7 on: November 03, 2015, 10:07:07 AM »
I still do, but I haven't had a spare minute to narrow it down.  Still using Max 2014 as a stop gap...

iToo

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Re: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« Reply #8 on: November 03, 2015, 05:07:34 PM »
We continue working on this. We made some changes in the code, and it seems stable rendering locally but there are problems with Backburner yet.
Our next step will be to test the same code with Max 2015 and compare.
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

iToo

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Re: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« Reply #9 on: November 11, 2015, 12:23:14 PM »
I'm glad to announce that we finally found the problem: it seems that Max 2016 sends a notification update to the scene, once the render has started (probably related with the Nitrous changes).
That was invalidating several data structures used by Forest, and causing the crash.

The fix is included in Forest Pro 5.0.0 beta. We made several Backburner tests and it was completely stable. I hope the problem is fixed completely.

Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

LL4733

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Re: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« Reply #10 on: October 21, 2017, 01:08:03 AM »
Hi guys,

A long time ago we reported the problems with the Mental ray network render.
We have been working with 3dsMax 2015 and Forest Pack 4.2.5 until now.
Now we have tested with 3dsMax 2017 and Forest Pack 5.4.1 and see that the problem is still there: Sometimes it renders, sometimes it doesn't.
Am I really the only one with this problem? Are you still working on it?

Johan

Michal Karmazín

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Re: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« Reply #11 on: October 23, 2017, 03:21:33 PM »
Hi Johan,

Sorry to hear you're still facing troubles with it. Please enable the log by setting General - Log Level to Debug on any of Forest objects in your scene, before sending it to renderer. The log fine is located at:

C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsmax\<max version>\ENU\Network\Max.log


Would you mind to send us the log file for the node which don't render correctly? Ideally, please try to reproduce the problem with a minimal scene and send us such scene to check it here. Thanks a lot for your collaboration, your feedback is very important to us.

Best regadrs,

LL4733

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Re: Forest Pack 4.4 Mental Ray rendering problems
« Reply #12 on: November 03, 2017, 07:51:08 PM »
Hi,

I have send some log files by mail.
Thanks for looking at it.
Johan