Creating Interactive groom doesn't work as expected.

[wreliford]

Interactive groom does not work as expected. After creating a groom for a bushy beard, everything looks fine when I do a test render. But when I send the same scene to render out on the render farm, it is as if the groom doesn't recognize any of the grooming. The hair stand straight outward. All clumping, noise are combing are ignored. 

I tried creating a cache but creating the cache freezes my workstation for up to an hour just to cache 300 frames. In addition, my computer runs of of memory even though I have 126 gigs installed. This doesn't make sense.

Then even if I get the cache to work, my render times for the same scene goes from 4 minutes to 17 minutes. 

Please help. Thanks!!

[wreliford]

 Here is a screen shot of the issue.

 

[jordan.giboney]

Hi @wreliford 

Thanks for posting! Out of curiosity, are you having similar results if you render locally? Same render results?

What version of Maya are you using? Are you on Windows, Mac, or Linux?

Thanks again for being a part of our community!

[wreliford]

Thank you for replying!

When I do a test render (one frame) locally, it is fine. I tried to batch render on the same machine locally, it renders with the hairs out of place as you see in the example. It seems whenever I do any sort of batch rendering, the hairs don't seem to stay in place. By the way, the underline mesh for the hair description is moving ever so slightly since this character upper lip is twitching because he is snoring. It is a blend shape where the description mesh is wrapped deformed to the face.  

I am on a windows 10 pro machine using Maya 2019.2. I am in a middle of a production, but if maya 2020 yields different results due to some underlining optimized code I will make the move. But I didn't read anything regarding maya2020 making any changes to interactive grooming. Please help, this is the main character of the film.

[wreliford]

I just double checked. I use the command line batch render and I get hairs out of place. 

I did a batch render with just one node, and I get hairs out of place.

I did the same frame to do a test render and everything is as expected. 

There is something going on with batch rendering with interactive hair?

When I render from a cache  .abc the groom and everything is as expected. However, I am having real issues with creating and rendering cache. First of all, when creating a cache say like 300 frames, the computer will crunch out one frame per second, but when if finishes, the computer hangs for up an hour at least. Also, while creating the cache, my computer runs out of memory and I have 126 gigs install. The cache ultimately is less the 2.2 gigs. Not sure what is going on. My computer is an i9-9980ex using m.2 drives 126gigs .

[jordan.giboney]

Hi @wreliford 

Thanks for keeping us posted with your testing! I chatted with our development team and they said that caching is the correct workflow to avoid the IGS behavior - this is logged in our system and they are investigating a cause.

As for the memory on your computer, have you verified that none of the memory sticks have gone bad? 

Thanks again for being a part of our community!

[wreliford]

I figured caching is the best workflow for IGS. Can you verify if caching is needed if the underling description mesh doesn't move?

As for my computer memory, I don't suspect any bad ram but I will test them again. I use other programs like After Effect and Houdini (Sims) that rely on heavy ram usage with no issue. 

I am still puzzled as to why my ram usage is so excessive during IGS caching? I can see caching using ram but not in excessive of 126 gigs for a shot that is 300 frames for a beard. Could there be memory leakage happening? Is there a cap on how large a cache file could be?