Displacement map issue with Arnold : MAYA freezes or the object disappears.

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I'm an animation student currently working on a short movie, using Maya 2018 update 5 and Arnold. I need to use displacement maps on some rocks; but everything is preventing me from doing so !

First of all, I've tested displacement maps on a simple cube : subdivision type is catclark, iterations are 5, autobump is on. Everything works as intended.

I then tried to apply a displacement map to another shader, used for a larger, more polygon-dense, rock. Problems arise :

-Setting the subdivision type to catclark on the rock makes it disappear in the render view but now in the viewport, and having iterations higher than 3 makes MAYA crash every single time.

- The rock will only be visible if the subdivision type is set to none. But, as a result, the displacement map won't work well. 

-Trying to add subdivisions to the rock's model and then setting the subdivision type to catclark will make MAYA crash.

Does anyone have an idea as to how to fix this issue, please ? Some other people seem to have this issue : https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-forum/issue-with-geometry-randomly-disappearing-from-the-arnold-...but no one seems to have found a solution...

Thank you and have a good day.

[Stephen.Blair]

Please post an Arnold log (verbosity level = Info) or an repro scene (a minimal scene that reproduces the problem).