Mental Ray crashes on instances...

[ArtifactDesign]

Just want to report that the latest release of Maya 2014 Service Pack 4 still crashes instantly when you try to render any polygon instances.  Even cubes and spheres.  Worked in 2013.  Kind of a big bug, and can't believe this wasn't addressed in the latest release.

Artifact Design

[tony.su]

I tried in my computer. I get render result without crash. could you zip you scene file and upload?

[ArtifactDesign]

Just play a few frames to generate the particles.  The geometry is already instanced.  Give it a render in mental ray, fatal crash.  I showed Lee Frasier a few months ago, he saw it too.  I'm not doing anything different between Maya 2013 and 2014, worked in 2013 though.  Thanks for looking in to this.  Autodesk support is doing a noticeable great job on following up on this stuff.

THX
Artifact

[tony.su]

I tested in my computer, it worked.

So, could you rename your maya setting folder, and try it again?

1. close maya.

2. rename this folder.

Windows XP

  c:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\maya\<version>

Windows 7

  c:\Users\<username>\Documents\maya\<version>

3. lunch maya2014 and try again.

[ralphymeijer]

Yeah, it's still crashing. We're on osx Mountain Lion and maya 2014. Would be really nice if this could be fixed.

[tony.su]

o.

in mac you can try this.

MAC

1) Go to "Go > Go to folder..."

2) type /Users/[username]/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/

4) Find the 2014-x64 folder and rename it to "2014-x64_backup"

5) Restart Maya 2014 and if prompted to select the option to create default preferences.

[ralphymeijer]

It is not really working. Nothing to do with the preferences really. It's probably a bug in the conversion to mental ray since it works in Maya software renderer. The processbar in the bottom left mentions "mental ray translating frame 01" and then is crashes.

[ArtifactDesign]

Hi Tony.Su

I'm also on a Mac.  I tried default presets as you specified, and it still crashed.  I attached a crash report.

THX
Artifact

[tony.su]

In my mac, render at first frame and batchrender worked fine. But render at other frame crashed. 

[Jend90]

Good morning Tony.su,

Im having the same issues when trying to render with mental ray an instance using particles within Maya 2014 in a Mac. 

I have installed service pack 4 and done the backup file correction but it keeps crashing. 

2013 is working great with particles instances and mentalray.

Is there any news on the matter?

Thank you very much for your time and support,

I have attached my error message just in case. 

[ArtifactDesign]

Hey Jend90,

Don't know if this helps, but I made a quick script for to convert the instances to geometry. It's only for 1 frame, it's not a dynamic expression, and it requires you to create indexPP, where indexPP=id%int (where int is the number of instances you have). I can attach a simple scene if you want. Hope this helps.


#convert instances to geo
import maya.cmds as cmds

def instancer(woman, man):

position = cmds.getAttr("nParticle1_PeopleShape.position") #query particle positions
index = cmds.getAttr("nParticle1_PeopleShape.indexPP") #query particle ID

x = 0 #counter variable

for p in position:

if index[x] == 0.0:
#print("This is a woman.")
newWoman = cmds.instance(woman)
cmds.setAttr("{0}.translate".format(newWoman[0]), p[0], p[1], p[2], type="double3")

else:
#print("This is a man.")
newMan = cmds.instance(man)
cmds.setAttr("{0}.translate".format(newMan[0]), p[0], p[1], p[2], type="double3")

x += 1

instancer("pInst_W", "pInst_M")

[Jend90]

Thank you very much for your quick response ArtifactDesign. I will take a look into this script.

I have tried to render particles instances in Maya 2014 in a Windows computer and it work perfectly fine. I guess I will try to reinstall everything from maya in my macbook.

I have been using meanwhile the spPaint3d 1.1.1 tool.

Thank you once again for your script, I will take a look to that later in the day.

Have a nice day.