Maya Station

mental ray Satellite 2013 Windows not working on machines

We have had users report that mental ray satellite 2013 is not running on some Windows 7 machines.  Users have reported errors of failed connection to the satellite machine or even running the service will fail with errors.

This seems to be occurying on machines that have missing Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package which contains needed libraries to run some of our prodcts correctly. 

We provide the installer (vc redist_x64.exe) with our discs and our downloads. The downloaded package generally extracts to "C:\Autodesk" directory. After doing the extraction browse to the Maya directory in "C:\Autodesk" you will find the 3rd Party installer in "\3rdParty\x64\VCRedist\2010SP1\vc redist_x64.exe"

After the package gets installed everything should be working.

More information about Microsoft's Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package can be found here.

I just wanted to thank our users for making us aware of this issue.

Cheers!

Nelson

 

Backburner 2012.1.1

I have some great news for our Backburner users who are running into issues submitting jobs from Maya.  We have just posted a public release of Backburner 2012.1.1.  There are some key fixes and I highly recommend you upgrade if you are running into any of the issue listed below.

The download can be found in the Autodesk.com site here.

I highly recommend you uninstall the current version and remove all Backburner preferences before installing the newest cut.

After you install and get backburner up and running attempt to submit a job.  If you still seem to be getting a connection refused error when submitting a job, try entering 7347 as the port value and submit again.

Setting this value will pass the default setting where cmdjob uses multicast to connect to the manager and fails.

Bug Number	Description
MAYA-7652	No connection could be made, target machine refused error while submitting a job or if a port was manually entered in the Submission window
MAYA-8238	Manager fails to launch with machines with multiple network adapters
MAYA-8117	Problem closing Manager on Windows 7 64-bit operating system
MAXX-4177	Manager creates duplicate job handles when multiple jobs are sent within one second of each other

Best of luck!

Nelson

 

 

Getting BackBurner rendering on Windows and Mac OS X simultaneously

Every now and then we do get asked if BackBurner does cross platform rendering.  The simply answer is yes but there is indeed some setup involved to make sure things work.  

In this video I explain two key components to get this up and running.  The first is setting the correct path to Maya's render command so both Windows and Mac OS can use the same command when submitting the job.  The second task here is to mount a samba drive on Mac OS.   In the video I show a simple method of gettng this done but you will loose the mount at reboot.  To keep the mount through reboot I suggest you lookingto launchctl command and how to use it.

Hope this helps!

 

Creating simple fog in Maya with mental ray

A very short video showing users how to create a simple fog effect with a spolight. Using the mental ray transmat and parti volume nodes are the building blocks needed to get you on your way to creating volumetric fog effect.

Hope you enjoy.

 

Virtual Memory: a performance issue often forgotten

Are you working with large scenes or with big textures? Are you experiencing software crashes?

Possible scenario: You are working on a computer with Windows 7 and 6GB of RAM. When you load the scene, the memory usage is somewhere around 5GB. If you try to start a batch-render process Maya may crash.

Socket error creating command port

We see this come through support once in awhile and I wanted to use this blog post to try and explain what can be happening to cause this issue.

First, some quick background. Even though Maya is rendering locally it still depends on these sockets for communication. Maya will simply use this communication channel like a two radio communication between the batch render application and Maya. So what happens in a network environment is that Maya will actually routes itself through the network back to your machine.

This is why you must to make sure that the firewall settings are allowing the mayabatch process through regardless of being on a network or not. The firewall is the most simplest solution but we do run into atleast another two scenarios in support.

1. You may also have two Maya session loaded, maybe a background render that has not completed and is locking the port. To fix this either wait till the process is completed for submitting another bacth or check your tasks and kill off the rogue mayabatch.

2. The other is a DNS issue, we find this generally on the Mac side of things. We have seen this after a system has picked up a new IP from the server but the DNS has not refreshed itself and is now pointing to another machine. Since the machine is loaded on the network it has a difficult time finding itself. Generally this issues fixes itself after a few hours.

If that does not happen to work out, you can try flushing the DNS cache on your local machine manually.

In a Mac OS terminal simply run the following. You may need to reboot afterwards.

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

Hope this helps!

Cheers!

BackBurner 2012.1.0 update

With the releases of Maya 2012 SP1 & SAP there is a newer version of BackBurner 2012 that addresses a few areas of concerns for Maya users.  These are:

1. Submitting Backburner jobs would sometimes hang Maya.

2. Backburner 2012 discards all network adapters on some laptops if wireless is present.

3. Launching Backburner service on Mac with start command would fail.

4. Backburner on Mac OS X always rebooting after each render job is completed.

The 2012.1 update for Backburner is available in the Maya SP/SAp installers.  If you wish to install it on its own. A download has been made available on the Autodesk website: you can download it here.

Cheers!

Nelson

Viewport 2.0 and API Introduction

One of the most important and the biggest changes of the last release (Maya 2012) was Viewport 2.0.  I want to take this opportunity to provide you some additional information on the new Viewport 2.0 API. Previously in Maya if you had several high polygon models and you were trying to manipulate those models, Maya sometimes could behave slowly.

Viewport 2.0 is a brand new rendering system it is based on an internal technology by Autodesk. By using this new architecture, we are trying to replace all the old rendering system. As you can see this is a fundamental architecture change. The purpose of the change is to have high performance when rendering large complicated scenes. Viewport 2.0 is much faster compared to the old viewport. Keep in mind when importing this new technology, we have dramatically changed the way shading and rendering works in Maya.

Viewport 2.0 provides a programmable shader system allowing you more flexibility with customization. You can customize a shape, a shader, or a rendering process; it’s all possible with this new system. This new rendering system includes a new viewport 2.0, but also includes a batch version called Hardwar Renderer 2.0. In Maya 2012 there are a lot of new classes in the API. Since some of the new classes have the same name as the old classes, the new classes are in a new namespace called MHWRender.

~Kristine

BackBurner renders fail after 60 minutes - Part 2

I thought of revisiting the BackBurner timeout situation after a few customers mentioned that the need to manually enter the timeout was slightly annoying. 

Since any permanent changes would need to be done by our development team. I thought It would be best to share a more permanent approach to get the timeout set.

Now setting this does involve editing the performExportToBackburner.mel file which support team does not generally recommend but editing these file.  Please make a local backup of the file before editing it.  

We can simply add  an extra line of code to force the timeout to be a new permanent value. Since we are editing this at the file level you will no longer need to populate the command manually when submitting the job.

So, this is what has to be done.

1. Go to: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya 2012\scripts\others
2. locate the file called performExportToBackburner.mel and make a backup of this file.
3. Now open the original file in word pad and locate the the following line.

"// Prepare the list of tasks and send it to Backburner through a task list file"

4. A few lines below that I add a new line.  The new line is in bold below.

// Prepare the list of tasks and send it to Backburner through a task list file
int $startFrame = `intFieldGrp -q -v1 bbExportStartFrameCtl`;
int $endFrame = `intFieldGrp -q -v1 bbExportEndFrameCtl`;
int $taskSize = `intFieldGrp -q -v1 bbExportTaskSizeCtl`;
if( $taskSize < 1) $taskSize = 1;
string $taskListFileName = createTaskListFile($jobName, $startFrame, $endFrame, $taskSize);
if($taskListFileName != "")
{
$exportSysCmd = $exportSysCmd + " -timeout 360 ";
}

5. Save the file.  Launch Maya and submit job and the new task timeout will be set to 360 minutes by default for every job.

Hope this helps the folks out there struggling with the timeout in BackBurner.

 

How to sample a 3D texture

Sampling the colour values of a pixel on a 2D texture is easy enough in Maya; there is the MEL command 'colorAtPoint', and you can emit particles from a texture and query the RGB values per particle. Sampling a colour value of a 3D texture is not so straightforward, and the approach suggested in the documentation is to bake your 3D texture to an image file and use the aforementioned methods to query colour values on the resulting texture.

In this post, I'll demonstrate how to implement an API function that samples a 3D texture at any given XYZ point, and returns an RGB value.