Monthly Archives: June 2018

The case of the too-low OptiX version

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In this case, when the user tried to render after enabling the OptiX denoiser, they got this error:

ERROR | [gpu] OptiX version 0.30.91 is lower than the minimum required version 5.0.0

This was with MtoA 3.0.1, which means Arnold 5.1.1.0

So, that means there is an incompatible version version of the OptiX library on the system, and it’s being loaded instead of the OptiX that ships with MtoA.

I probably could have just checked the PATH setting, but I used Process Monitor to absolutely sure, and I found this:

pml_furryball_optix

The problem is that another renderer added itself to the PATH. That’s a bad thing 😉

The solution? Remove that folder from PATH. Create a batch file or wrapper script to set the required environment when you start Maya to use the other software. Rather like the mtoa module file sets PATH when you start Maya.

NOTE In previous versions of MtoA, this would prevent MtoA from even loading.

kicking ass with debug shading

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You can use kick to render with debug shading. Here’s the flags to use:

  • -is to ignore the shaders assigned to the shapes
    When you ignore shaders, a default utility shader is used to render the scene.
  • -sm sets the shade mode ( ndoteye lambert flat ambocc plastic metal)
  • -cm sets the color mode (color ng ns n bary uv u v dpdu dpdv p prims uniformid wire polywire obj edgelength floatgrid reflectline bad_uvs nlights id bumpdiff pixelerror)

Here’s some examples that show how to kick with different types of debug shading (I’ve used the Arnold Render View debug shading modes for these examples)

 

Debug shading kick flags
Basic: disable all shaders in the scene, switching to a gray ‘ndoteye’ shader; a very fast shading mode. 
kick -is

or

kick -is -sm notdoteye
Lighting: renders the scene with a white lambert shader 
kick -is -sm lambert
Occlusion: use ambient occlusion shading 
kick -is -sm ambocc
Wireframe: displays geometry as a wireframe 
 kick -is -cm polywire

or

kick -is -sm ndoteye -cm polywire
Normal: visualizes the normal vector (between 0 and 1, in tangent space) 
 kick -is -sm flat -cm n
UV: displays the coordinates of the primary UV set (red=U, green=V) 
 kick -is -sm flat -cm uv
Primitive ID: displays random colors based on the per-primitive (triangle, curve) index 
 kick -is -sm flat -cm prims
Barycentric: displays intra-primitive parametric coordinates (barycentric for triangles, parametric length, and width for curve segments) 
 kick -is -sm flat -cm bary
Object: displays random colors based on the per-object ID 
kick -is -sm flat -cm obj