No batch rendering with Bifröst?

[Bennyhase]

Hi,

have somebody tried to batch render a precached Bifröst sequence with mentalray without meshing?

I mean the option to render the iso-surface of a Bifröst-Particle System without meshing.

Rendering still one frame is possible.

Rendering via Batch will render only Frame 1 and then stops.

Would be nice to know if i made a mistake. Batchrendering the Isosurface without meshing would be great to get an idea for the final mesh....

[swislion]

When rendering a sequence with batch render, i have the same problem, black.

[Bennyhase]

ok, for my setup it will only work to batchrender a iso-surface of bifrost if you start your render with the 1st frame of the cached (!) simulation.

Batchrendering between a cached simulation will not work.

[agraham]

This is a known issue with Maya 2015 and is fixed in 2015 SP1.

Unfortunately there is a (sigh) bug in SP1 that prevents the mentalray Bifrost libraries from installing correctly, so you can't render Bifrost liquids at all. My advice is to completely uninstall Maya 2015 including mentalray and install Maya 2015 SP1 fresh.

[swislion]

So if i understand ,with maya 2015 SP1 fresh install, batch will render
voxels and created mesh? And bifrost will work correctly?

[agraham]

It was found to be a bug in the SP1 installer, where older components of mentalray were installed rather than the correct ones.

I'm pretty sure that a fresh install of everything -- after removing both Maya 2015 AND mentalray -- will do the trick.

If not, SP2 will be coming out very soon, that already has the fix.

[Kerim95]

What is Bifrost?

Is a part of Maya, or a plugin,

I've just heard of it, as a plugin used to generate or render liquid simulation.

How to get it? and where to download it?

Please help me out))

[hoganburrows]

Hi Adrian

I have found that if I render Bifrost Aero caches with batch render or on a farm the frame takes hours (9+), but if you render with the render view its less the 10 mins?

Something is happening with the stratch cache loading all the frames i think, as this is the default setting when loading a scene on a different computer.... maybe

so i ended up usin this python script to render from the render view

import maya.cmds as cmds

import maya.mel as mel

startFrame = 0

endFrame = 24

mel.eval('currentTime %s ;'%(startFrame))

while(startFrame < endFrame):

    mel.eval('renderWindowRender redoPreviousRender renderView;')

    startFrame += 1

    mel.eval('currentTime %s ;'%(startFrame))

Bifrost is still awesome btw , please make it easy to convert the BIF cache to PRT cache, why has the option dissapeared 

[agraham]

@hoganburrows, sounds like you're trying to render a non-cached simulation? Maya may be trying to run up to each and every frame. Is it the SIMULATION or the RENDER that's taking so long?

When you render from the command line, make sure to specify the flag '-mr:v 5', which will spit out detailed mentalray stats to the terminal.

BTW, I did a tutorial on converting BIF to PRT on my blog here:

    http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/valhalla/converting-bif-files-to-prt

[agraham]

@Kerim95, uh, that's an...interesting question.

I'd start here:

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/Maya/file...

[Stiaan101]

Can someone please help me my deadline is in 2 weeks and my bifrost sim is cashed to disk but when i batch render it with mentelray or hardware 2.0 it renders everything ecept the bifrost mesh. im using maya 2016 sp6