Shave...Mental Ray for Maya

[Kronos_22]

I know DT is working on getting us our Shave training kit but I am in the middle of a production piece and I can't seem to get any help from the shave guys so maybe some of the great and wise artists we have around here could help us out.

Here's what we got - Fester has a SSS Fastskin shader for his main skin, and a blinn for his antlers, as pictured below. When we started out, we got these results. I am aware that there are some issues with rendering out SSS with alpha, and it's causing our hair system to be to be seen on the oposite side of the geometry.

What's taxing me right now is not the SSS issues, it's the antlers. For some reason, the antlers are staying behind the hair system, and they have full alpha. Any suggestions?


http://static.flickr.com/87/253022633_fd2965cdc8_o.jpg

We are rendering this out on a RenderPal farm using MentalRay for Maya batch render.

Any and all ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[sunder]

Hi Kronos. It looks like you're using the Shave buffer. I have a hunch that the Shave buffer cannot comp itself properly onto whatever RenderPal is returning. Another possibility is Shave cannot see/find the texture file applied to the antlers and renders on top of it.
Perhaps you should try and render with Mental Ray primitives instead of the Shave buffer as quick workaround. I'll take a better look at this later.

[Kronos_22]

Hi Kronos. It looks like you're using the Shave buffer. I have a hunch that the Shave buffer cannot comp itself properly onto whatever RenderPal is returning. Another possibility is Shave cannot see/find the texture file applied to the antlers and renders on top of it.
Perhaps you should try and render with Mental Ray primitives instead of the Shave buffer as quick workaround. I'll take a better look at this later.

Sunder,
Thanks for the quick response. Is that setting under the Shave globals? I'm at work and can't look right now. Come on lunch break lol. :)

Thanks
Kronos

[Kronos_22]

Hi Kronos. It looks like you're using the Shave buffer. I have a hunch that the Shave buffer cannot comp itself properly onto whatever RenderPal is returning. Another possibility is Shave cannot see/find the texture file applied to the antlers and renders on top of it.
Perhaps you should try and render with Mental Ray primitives instead of the Shave buffer as quick workaround. I'll take a better look at this later.

Sunder,
This is what we have figured out. If I render in Hair Primatives I jump my render time from about 6 minutes a frame to around 35 minutes a frame with nothing rendered in the frame...Just a black frame. We tried Geometry and gave up after 3 hours with nothing rendered.
We have narrowed it down to something with mayabatch. If I render a single frame inside the maya gui everything looks perfect. If I run a batch command from the same machine inside maya the hair lays on top of the antlers. If I run a batch command from the farm the hair lays on top of the antlers.
We have fixed the alpha channel in the SSS node by linking the SSS-Shader`s out-value to the surface-shader`s out-color and connecting the lightmap to the surface-shader`s shadinggroup. Now we have a beautiful alpha channel. (Thanks Dr.Rastaman (Shave Group)).

Attached is a picture of my shave globals.
Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Kronos

[Kronos_22]

Joe alter just got back to us.

"I see what's up - it's actually a maya8 maya2mr bug that we logged,
but I thought we had put a workaround in, running a build now.
(4.2.7) - should post in about 10 mins."

Thanks For All your Help!

Kronos
Moxægen Labs.