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Author Topic: Missing polygons in Railclone objects throughout render sequence  (Read 3333 times)

ISG_User

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Is anybody else experiencing this.    Frustratingly it is beginning to occur for me on a regular(ish) basis. 

I use Railclone heavily in my scenes, including generating walls with openings, doorways etc.  A build sequence animation will have to show the construction of a typical drywall with studwork, insulation and boards going up.  Railclone is a massive time saver while making it much easier to create more accurate models. 

However, whether I collapse the wall (for animation) or not (background objects not animated), I've begun noticing some of the frames throughout a render sequence are missing polygons on these Railclone objects.  I'm sitting here now with a few frames I'll have to fix, annoying as the job is finished and I want to hand it over.

Images below show the issue.

OK


Polys missing on Railclone object, not collapsed


Instanced Railclone - Polys in place, but some normals? issue?? or something else


this particualr object has not been animated at all, it's for the background.  And this has happened before, and naturally it's only apparent after rendering and comping, as the object looks perfectly fine (backface cull on) in Max.

Any ideas, help? I'd like to try to avoid this occurring again, one of these days it will bite me on the ass on deadline day!!

I've attached the Railclone object as a scene, minus maps.

T

Paul Roberts

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Re: Missing polygons in Railclone objects throughout render sequence
« Reply #1 on: January 23, 2015, 08:54:39 PM »
Hi,

I'm glad to hear you find RailClone useful for your work and sorry to hear you have encountered this problem. Unfortunately we are unable to reproduce it here. Are you able to provide a file that can easily illustrate the issue, preferably just by hitting render? Or is it more unpredictable that this? Also can you confirm if the problem still occurs if you collapse the RailClone object to an editable mesh or when you use RailClone Tools to export the geometry to instances. If you need help with this You can find it in the Utilities panel  > More ... >  RailClone Tools . Feel free to check the  Reference Documentation.

Many thanks,

Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software

ISG_User

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Re: Missing polygons in Railclone objects throughout render sequence
« Reply #2 on: January 26, 2015, 10:05:46 AM »
Update,

I've may have figured this current problem.!!  But cannot compare this over previous jobs that have displayed this issue.

After coming in this morning after a weekend's worth of rendering and discovering another set of renders with the same issue. 

I've had one of my render nodes off line for a while, about three months!  The IT here is rubbish, they haven't been able to fix it in all this time, so I haven't been using it.  Someone finally managed to get it back online earlier this week, so I enthusiastically got it rendering again.  Having been able to study the render nodes this morning in Backburner's Monitor, and see which node rendered which problem frame, I have now figured that in the three months or so this single node has been offline, I've upgraded Railclone to 2.3.4, and this problematic node, because it wasn't being used, wasn't upgraded, still running on 2.1.6.


The previous version of Railclone gets it's spline segment ID's mixed up when receiving a job from a newer version.

 


ISG_User

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Re: Missing polygons in Railclone objects throughout render sequence
« Reply #3 on: January 26, 2015, 10:15:23 AM »
Paul,

I may have solved this current problem, but I do have another scene from a few weeks back that is similar, but not the same issue.  What that scene does, (and has happened before on another ) is again render missing polygons (usually on walls) but these objects have been collapsed from the Railclone, and it doesn't occur on odd frames, it's every frame, hence there's clearly a hole in the object.  The way I was able to fix it was by deleting the problematic poly and rebuilding it.  Two jobs that has occurred on.

I do end up with fairly complex scenes, lots of animation keyframes, modifiers, visibilty tracks etc, and I know Max is crap sometimesm so I'm not sure if this is related to Railclone or not, but the common feature is that it occurs on edit polys that have been collapsed from a Railclone object.

When I get some time I'll dig out the scene and post it up to you.  Sorry, I've got to crack on with some work for now..

ISG_User

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Re: Missing polygons in Railclone objects throughout render sequence
« Reply #4 on: February 27, 2015, 10:55:23 AM »
The issue I experience with collapsed railclone meshes has occurred again.  Note the rendering artefact at the far wall.


here is the issue in an animation, not the first time this has happened to me.  I build my perimeter walls, facades etc in the same fashion for every job.  A spline at floor level, diferent ID's for wall types, doors, lintels, windows etc.  It's quick, generic and effective for my needs.  Normally I set the general wall to scale, windows and doors to adaptive or scale, and repetitive features to tile if needed.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4477507/itoosoft/polygons.mp4

The far wall is displaying something strange.  It's a collapsed mesh from a railclone generator.  Initial inspection of the poly shows it's facing in the correct direction, and nothing seems amiss.  The original segment was set to scale, and it returns around the left hand corner towards the window.  Here however, as I've discovered with railclone, is that at the corner junction the vertices are not welded, and extra vertices have been added.


Only by welding the corner vertices in this area, could I remove the rendering artifact.


Could I get some enlightenment on what's occurring here, it's becoming frequent.


Paul Roberts

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Re: Missing polygons in Railclone objects throughout render sequence
« Reply #5 on: February 27, 2015, 11:21:32 AM »
Hi,

I'm very sorry to hear you are still experiencing these problems. We haven't had reports of this occurring before but we're keen to get to the bottom of this and resolve the issue. Are you able to send us the scene so we can take a detailed look? If you have the original RC style before collapsing it that would be helpful too. If you'd rather not post publicly, you can send the file to support@itoosoft.com.

Many thanks,

Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software

ISG_User

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Re: Missing polygons in Railclone objects throughout render sequence
« Reply #6 on: March 26, 2015, 12:59:05 PM »
Paul,

I've just encountered the same issue on another project.   below is a link to a video of the issue, and next is another still showing the wall as fine.  Although it's not necessarily obvious, it's clear from the video the mesh has some sort of hole in it.

As you suggested above, I'll email you a link to download the zipped scene.  Once again, its a Railclone generated object, in this instance however, I haven't collapsed the object to a mesh. 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4477507/itoosoft/RC_HOLE%20IN%20WALL.mp4