Forest Pack (6.3 and above) not RENDERING on railclone objects

[DS5736]

I just upgraded from FP6 to FP7 and am running into a problem where FP will not render on to railclone objects.  The viewport display and behavior of FP is fine with everything running and distributing normally.  It's only during render where nothing shows up.  Specifically I upgraded from 6.2.2 to 7.1.1.  The scene(s) render just fine when I roll back to 6.22 but are empty in 7.1.1.  If I have the multiple surfaces set up for the scatter, non RC objects render just fine. while the RC ones are empty. It seems however that the issue may have cropped up in 6.3.1 as I tried that as well with no objects being rendered.  I'm on max 2020 with RC 4.32.  I'm trying to distribute vray proxies but the problem persists with just plan boxes or billboards as well.

[Rokas]

Hi.

Pleas try to disable RailClone instancing engine. That should help.

[DS5736]

Thank you, that does make it work but why the change?  Not using the instancing engine also causes the "Use Segment Material" to not work (unless I'm missing something.

[Rokas]

It might got there unintentionally. Agree that previously it worked better. We will review. Thank You for bringing this to our attention.

[iToo]

I'm checking this, and as your pointed out, it seems to work in some cases with FP 6.2.0.
But this was non intentional. Perhaps Forest was taking the RailClone viewport mesh, or other cached data. It's difficult to know, without checking all code changes between FP 6.2 and 6.3.

Really, it's not possible to use RailClone as Surface when Instancing is enabled, because RailClone doesn't generate a real geometry. Segments exists only at render time.
The only workaround is to create a separated RailClone object, used exclusively as surface, and hide it from render. You also should simplify this secondary RC, to avoid generating a huge mesh.

[DS5736]

I've been using this fairly consistently to distribute on railclone objects for a couple of years.  It always required setting the railclone object to Mesh.  I was basically following the guidance here: https://forum.itoosoft.com/railclone-pro-(*)/using-a-railclone-object-surface-for-forestpack/.