AW: AW: Hair flicker, no popping

Date : Sat, 28 Jul 2007 16:14:46 +0200
To : <XSI(at)Softimage.COM>
From : "FLINX(at)mark13" <flinx(at)mark13.com>
Subject : AW: AW: Hair flicker, no popping
oh...just jumped in the studio to check my renders....and, tataa, good men helping.....
 
thanks guys!
 
BUT we already avoided the dynamics.....there are no dynamics on these hairs......
(well, i hope for holger anyway, because i would have to kill him, if that was the problem)
 
since we always have problems with cached particle stuff and the character has so short hair, we didn't bother about dynamics....right holger?????
 
we are just stuck here, because this is just one of four characters with hair, that we are doing...for now i render the whole sequence on one machine (half way through and looking good).....but this will take to long once we have all the others finished.....the fastest machines need around 4 days for one character-sequence...
if they render by themselves (2500 frames per character).......
 
it seems that anytime we close the scene....open it again, render something, the hairs jump to a different position or style, i can't say......
 
strangely the first render on 8 machines worked fine except on one machine.....and i couldn't isolate this one, because the failure occured on every other machine afterwards......??????????????????????????????
 
any other ideas?
 
 
 

 

 


Von: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] Im Auftrag von Kim Aldis
Gesendet: Samstag, 28. Juli 2007 09:08
An: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Betreff: RE: AW: Hair flicker

Manny?s probably right, but the steps for rebuilding the cache are very specific and need to be followed carefully - . Do this before rendering or capture and you should be fine:-

 

·         Set cache mode to read & write

·         Hit ?reset dynamics?

·         Park the timeline right at the end of your animation

·         Wait for sim to rebuild

·         Set cache mode to ?read only?.

 

Also, watch for the cache filename. Just like particles, the name is only unique within the scene. If you?ve more than one scene with dynamic hair in it you?ll end up using the same cache for some hair objects. Always rename the cache filename to be unique to the scene, preferably when you add dynamics.

 

Manny?s also right about avoiding dynamics when you can, not just because you don?t need it. Certainly don?t rely on collisions working with any degree of reliability. If you can get them to work,  be also aware of limitations, particularly what happens when hair strands fall either side of, say, noses and ears; when it renders the hair will be interpolated between the strands and cut through the geometry. Collisions are pretty flawed in this respect.

 

From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of Kris Rivel
Sent: 28 July 2007 04:08
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Subject: Re: AW: Hair flicker

 

XSI's hair caching sucks big time to be honest.  I recently wrapped up a project using quite a bit of hair instancing and I had to constantly re-sim the hair system to eliminate popping.  There's no guarantee that your sim will properly write or be read when rendering so you will often find yourself cursing quite loudly and re-simulating on a regular basis.  This is one area of XSI thats needs serious improvements.

Kris

On 7/27/07, Manny Papamanos <mpapama(at)softimage.com> wrote:

 

I don't think this should be labeled "flicker" since you are getting a series of good frames and occasionally there is a bad one.

This is a "pop".

 

When you render the bad frames and the same result occurs, I would suspect bad "cached" files from dynamics.

Someone may have messed up the cache by opening/playing with the scene and the cache was not set to "read only"

Or a computer can simply not access the cache.

 

To fix, you may need to:

 

Backup and remove the cached files

recreate the cache,

Make sure the path is accessible to all computers on the farm.

Render the popped frames.

I personally would avoid using dynamics on Hair since it's not really necessary here.

 

 

Manny Papamanos

XSI SPECIALIST AT SOFTIMAGE HEADQUARTERS

 

 

 


From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of Wayne Williams
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 12:02 PM
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Subject: Re: AW: Hair flicker

 

The max is 14 ya?

----- Original Message -----

Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 11:36 AM

Subject: AW: AW: Hair flicker

 

ok...i'll try that....the segments are up to 10 now....what would you recommend?

 

 

 

 


Von: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] Im Auftrag von briand(at)hatchling.com
Gesendet: Freitag, 27. Juli 2007 15:59
An: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Betreff: re: AW: Hair flicker

We had something pretty similar happen to us. What seemed to work was upping the # of segments on the hair.


From: "FLINX(at)mark13" <flinx(at)mark13.com>
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 6:13 AM
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Subject: AW: Hair flicker


ehhhmmmmm...holger that's not 100% correct...we had to rerender,
because ONE machine already messed up every 10th (or so) frame.

so we wanted to rerender on a machine that didn't produce bad results in the first render....but now those frames are fuckedup aswell....

here's a short movie: www.mark13.com/goto/flinxes


thanks for suggestions folks...

 






-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [ mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] Im Auftrag von Holger Weiss
Gesendet: Freitag, 27. Juli 2007 11:58
An: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Betreff: Hair flicker

Hi,
We have a bizzar problem with rendering hairs We open a scene with a hairy charakter and render it on different computers.
All is good and no flicker occures.
But than we have to do some rerenderings ( on one computer a day later) and the hairs behave totally different .

Had anybody same problem and a quite good solution???

Regards
Holger


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