MR Assmeblies and Passes

I didn't make it in time for the challenge (bummer ><) but I'm continuing work on this Dream Office project. As I add more stuff, I started running into memory problems, which is to be expected, no biggie. I've used mip_binaryproxies before and didn't have any issues, so I figured I'd give assemblies a shot, it doesn't hurt to learn, right? Wow! what a pain in the ass they've been so far!

So I'm trying to continue prancing merrily along, getting geared up to see my test renders, the image pops up and my proxies are sitting pretty with all the shaders of the original mesh, just delicious. I pull up my passes and the show just stops! The proxies weren't showing in the AO and zDepth passes, not even a little bit, I was getting black silhouettes where the geometry should be. I felt my shoulders slump. I'm running out of virgins and goats Maya!  I've never used assemblies before so there was a moment of total confusion when I thought that it was just too strange and maybe it's supposed to happen.  But then why would the objects turn up just fine in reflection passes etc?

I went ahead and created a simple scene to test the issue.





After toiling away and bouncing my troubles off a couple people, I figured something went wrong at the high res export stage. Apparently, exporting the .mi file with material assignment options checked is what caused the problem. 



I had to resort to the mip_binaryproxy workflow when it comes to assigning shaders, which is pretty much assigning the shaders to the low res object in the same order their tabs are listed in the attribute editor on the high res mesh, so yay for that.





I don't know why this happend, maybe I'll fiddle with it some more when I'm not so annoyed.

5 comments:

  1. Thanks Gen for sharing your experiences with this.

    I came across a post a while ago on the Maya support blog that talks about the workaround for your exact issue - http://mayastation.typepad.com/maya-station/2009/04/render-proxy-assembly-and-render-passes.html

    Maybe this is a prettier workaround for you, not sure.

    Keep posting and look forward to seeing the completed studio :-)

    Best,

    Rich

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  2. So, you say that if you deselect the "export material assignments" it won't work also?.

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  3. @ Richard

    Thanks for the link, that way looks slightly less hassling. I'm just a little disappointed that this is so busted given that the use of AO and zDepth info is common enough.

    @Joie

    When I check "Export material assignments" only, I still get the black hole effect, excecpt its now in the beauty pass and it even topped it off with some nasty artifacts. When I tried the "Export materials" only, the default lambert is what renders, I still had to assign the materials the mip_binaryproxy way anyway, so I ended up unchecking them both.

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  4. i also did some work on this a while back (and like you, i found it so exhausting it was the beginning of the end for mentalray for me). anyway, you might find it useful:

    http://www.tokeru.com/t/bin/view/Maya/MayaMentalRay#Proxies

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  5. Thanks for the link. It can a be love/hate relationship with MR for Maya at times.

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