Physical Camera shifts FOV/zoom on network rendered frames

[Anonymous]

Hi, I've seen some others posting about their issues with the Physical Camera in 3DS Max 2016 and I thought I should chime in about the problems I'm experiencing. 

I recently submitted a couple render jobs to my render farm and the rendered results show that the Physical Camera in my scene is rendering with different levels of zoom/FOV (?) depending on which machine the frames were rendered on. As a result, when I play back the animation the camera is incessantly jerking in and out at different zoom levels - making my render headache inducing to watch and completely unusable.  😠  

FYI  - if I create a preview animation with the Physical Camera or parent a regular camera to the Physical Camera the playback is smooth so this is definitely not an issue with how I animated the camera.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? The Physical camera has some great settings but I am finding it unreliable to work with and I am going to stick with using the regular camera as a result. 

I really wish Autodesk would fix this so I don't waste any more production time on this in the future.

Any thoughts on this?

[Alfred.DeFlaminis · Accepted solution]

Hello @Anonymous,

I'd like to help with this issue regarding rendering differences on your physical camera over the network.  Would it be possible to "Save Selected" on just the camera and attaching it here in the forums?  I'd to get a better look at it if possible.

In the meantime, can you double check that the render slaves and the developer machine all have the same service packs?  Are they all running the same operating system?

Thank you and best regards,

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi Alfred, thanks so much for your help. I tried to recreate the problem with a very simple scene but I first made sure to install the latest service packs on both my workstation and my rendering machine. This time when I rendered with the physical camera the results looked good. So I'm not sure if it was an issue of not having the latest service pack installed or if maybe there was something else buggy going on in my scene. I'm going to guess that the issue is resolved but I'll re-post here if I encounter the problem again. Thanks!!!

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

Thank you so much for posting in here and letting me know.  I'm very glad it worked out for you!  Having different service packs on slave machines has been known to create weird issues like this in the past.  Have a great week!

Best Regards,