User avatar
By RonB
#272432
Working on an image of rock candy swizzle sticks. Seven sticks, seven different colors. The candy tops are all derived from one model I created in Modeler. A single cube multiplied and varied using Point Clone Plus. Each candy top is rotated a bit and some cubes subtracted to make them more individual. Models are all very clean and proper, all polys tripled, about 17,000 polys each. All are using the same MXM with colors changed. Each MXM was created and saved separately.

When all are brought into the scene and rendered one is missing...the red one. It will render fine alone as seen in the first image.

Image

But when the group is rendered it's missing as shown in the second image.


Image

But wait it gets even better. I switched out the original red top with a duplicate of the blue, applied the red texture to it and it went missing too. I switched out the top a second time with a different color, the yellow, changed it's position and even kept the original yellow color and it's missing too!!

Image

I am completely baffled...each color swizzle stick renders fine alone. But as a group one will go missing. I rendered from Lightwave as well as bringing the saved MXS into Studio...same thing happens.

Any ideas on this?

Thanks much,
Ron
User avatar
By ivox3
#272443
No ideas ...... but man, .. that's kooky. lol ...
User avatar
By RonB
#272445
Yeah, crazy weird stuff...

I am on 64 bit OS XP Pro...was having the same stuff happening on 32 bit with the Ophelia scene...parts missing for no rhyme or reason that I can detect...

Have no idea whats going on.

BTW...in my experience 64 bit renders are slower even with 6 gigs of RAM than what I got on 32 bits with 2 gigs.

Crying in my beer...
User avatar
By RonB
#272509
Come on you guys...Herve...Mihnea..anybody. What the hell is going on here?

This is driving me nuts...I completely re-built the candy tops...much less res than before. No textures applied just default and this is the result:

Image
User avatar
By Mihnea Balta
#272518
Are you going through Studio or rendering directly from the plug-in? Try unchecking "use instancing" in the render options panel.
User avatar
By RonB
#272522
Mihnea,

You are my Maxwell Master...again you pulled my irons out of the fire with a simple suggestion...unchecking "use instancing" solved the issue.

Why did that happen, I am curious?

Thank you again my friend...much appreciated.

Cheers, Ron
User avatar
By Mihnea Balta
#272556
It shouldn't happen, you've probably discovered a bug in the plug-in. Could you send me the scene at mihnea.balta@gmail.com so I can investigate the bug and fix it?

Thanks. :)
User avatar
By RonB
#272667
Mihnea,

The scene is on it's way...

Cheers,
Ron
User avatar
By Mihnea Balta
#273067
Thank you for the scene, it is indeed a bug in the plug-in. The missing swizzle is incorrectly identified as an instance of one of the others. You end up with 7 swizzles in the exported scene, but the "missing" one is placed over one of the other six instead of its own stick, so you only see 6 in the render.

The bug was introduced in 1.6, but it is somewhat difficult to trigger so I guess that's why it took so long to affect somebody. I've fixed it but unfortunately it was too late and the patch didn't make it in the 1.7.5 release. We'll make a bugfix release soon, probably next week and we'll include the fix then. In the mean time the workaround is disabling instancing.

Thanks for helping us solve this.
User avatar
By RonB
#273234
Thank you for the fix and info...it was just a lucky occurrence on my part.
I look forward to the fix..

Cheers,
Ron
User avatar
By lpotamianos
#273439
is there a chance that the same bug exists in the 3dsmax plugin? I have had same thing with some instanced trees. Some of them would not show up, and their shadows would! I unchecked instancing and render would run ok
By Bogdan Coroi
#273441
Not a chance. The big bug in 3dsmax plug-in is the 3dsmax itself. There are some cases in which we can't get the correct position for the instanced geometry and we haven't found a way to do it yet.

In your case, the geometry is there but it's out of the view. Are you sure the shadows are correctly and there for all the missing instances?
User avatar
By Mihnea Balta
#273753
The problem should be fixed in 1.7.6, please check.
Chocolate test with SSS

nice