crowd render error

[jennehjenneh]

Hi

 

I have a problem when I am trying to render my cached crowd simulation.

 

If I render the dopimport everything renders fine and I get a bunch of soldiers running around.

Though as soon as I write my crowd sim to disk as bgeo or bgeo.gz (either using the ROP or the file node) and read them back in something strange happens.

In the viewport everything still seems fine but as you can see in the image it does something strange during the render.

 

If I cache my packed crowd sim to alembic it renders fine but it gets really slow and the file is huge compared to a bgeo sequence.

So I would rather fix this problem of rendering the bgeo sequence.

 

If I create any other packed object, it renders fine. It just seems to occur when I try to render a crowd simulation that is cached to disk.

 

I am using H14.0.335

 

Does anyone know what is causing this and how to fix it?

 

Thanks in advance!

Edited November 17, 2015 by jennehjenneh

[edward]

On the Agent SOP, when you read in the baked agents, do you have Keep External References unchecked? If that is checked, then Mantra needs to be able to find the baked agent files; which depending on your setup, Mantra isn't able to find.

[jennehjenneh]

On the Agent SOP, when you read in the baked agents, do you have Keep External References unchecked? If that is checked, then Mantra needs to be able to find the baked agent files; which depending on your setup, Mantra isn't able to find.

 

I did uncheck (and reload) it but unfortunately it didn't change anything. It still gives me the render error after caching it to disk.

 

I created a quick test scene with the standard mocapbiped character, cached it to disk and it renders fine.

So my guess is that it is related to my custom agent or rig. However I don't see why then it would render fine from the dop I/O and not after caching. 

[jennehjenneh]

I figured out what was causing the error in my renders.

 

In the crowd source SOP in the source tab one of the bones was not correctly linked. It referenced the wrong part of a chain. All was fine when it was not yet cached but once it was written to disk it exploded (only in the renders) on some frames because the link was bad and the reference was gone. 

Edited November 19, 2015 by jennehjenneh

[edward]

That's odd. I think that bone linking is just for the crowd solver for IK and lookats. I wouldn't expect that to be the cause of the problem you desribe.