Hi,

We are having issues with tiled renders not writing out the images planes that are present in scene. Doing a local render or non-tiled submission with Afanasy works as expected.

Looking at the tile renders generatedby the job before the stitch, it appears that whilst there is a separate .exrfile written out for every tile named “filename.exr.tile_1.exr” for example for tile #1, this contains no image plane information. We also have a file namedsimply “filename.exr” which does have embedded image planes but seems to be being written to by each node that is rendering a tile, simultaneously and is always unreadable.

Is this correct behaviour and does Afanasy actually support tiled rendering with image planes in Houdini? I would have thought that each separate tile .exr would contain all of the required image planes for the stitched image.

If you can shed any light on what we may be doing incorrectly that would be appreciated.
thanks
Tom

I'm not familiar with Afansy… but by “Image Plane” I assume you're referring to image planes that are written to different files? (i.e. the tiled rendering works for the extra planes that are written to same file as the beauty plane?) That sounds like a bug - can you file a ticket for it please?

Hi, Thanks for your reply. It's actually the extra image planes within the same file as the beauty that we are having problems with. Essentially at the end of the stitch we just get a beauty plane and nothing else in the final stitched render. The component tile .exr's also contain only the beauty plane. The image planes appear to be being written to an .exr that has no tile number suffix. This gets overwritten by each node as it renders it's assigned tile, rendering it redundant as the tile planes for each image are lost. It possibly appears as if the filename defined internally for the image planes does not get the “tile” suffix added and so these are being written to a file that has the final filename (without tile number suffix)?

I've attached a screengrab of the files I get out of a test submission, before the stitch. The straight .exr without tile suffix gets accessed and overwritten as each node completes it's tile. So the .exr's with tile suffix are what we should be getting in terms of file naming, for Afanasy to do the stitch automatically, just without any embedded image planes within.

For our actual submission we have 400 tiles, so manually joining is not an option.

thanks

So Afanasy is copying the output file into one with tile suffix, but only copying the beauty plane? I'm not sure why it's doing that, but sounds like a bug with Afanasy…

Yeah, that's right. If everything was working as expected then it should initially create only the files with the tile suffix, which would contain all image planes, and then merge into the single final .exr afterwards. I've posted on the Afanasy forum but thought I'd drop here as well in case someone had come across a similar behaviour.

Apparently it has not been confirmed tested with H16 but does work with H15.5. Do you know if there is anything changed from H15.5 to H16 in the way it writes to .exr, which could potentially be causing the behaviour?

Hi.
The next Afanasy release will use Houdini native itilestitch tool. Bug will gone (tested).

https://cgru.readthedocs.io/en/latest/software/houdini.html#tile-render [cgru.readthedocs.io]