Megascans flickering materials

[wilbertvandenbroek]

Hi,

So we are currently producing a short animation in which we use a lot of megascans maps.
Great assets and easy to use with the current plugin, I love it.

However when looking at rendered animation sometimes shaders are flickering on and of.
I've pinpointed this to the Fresnel IOR map that megascans generates. How is this possible?

Perhaps the same issue occurs on our network with different cpu's (amd ryzen and intels)

When I delete  the IOR map it solves the problem.

Anybody else got this strange behaviour?

[James Vella]

Just taking a stab in the dark here:
1. Is the location of the texture being accessed by all render machines? Check the asset location and network drives to make sure they can all read the file
2. maybe the gamma is being loaded differently per frame, you could try using a color correction node and over riding this instead of relying on its built in profile.
3. check all machines are using the same plugins/versions/updates of the softwares involved.

If you could upload a comparison of 2 frames where it changes this could help clarify the issue.
Also is it random?
Can you pin point which machines are doing this?
Is one machine producing 2 different results?

[wilbertvandenbroek]

Thanks for the reply, I've attached a short crop of the problem without giving away to much of the project :-)
You can clearly see the roof and the scifi elements flickr madly.

I found that the scifi object had a missing texture on the network.

The roof however is fine. All texture are located on the network. The machines that render correct are my own workstation and
one of the interns systems (both Ryzen).
I deleted the roofs Fresnel IOR map and now the flickering stopped. Still a weird thing. All versions/plugins are the same.
I'll have a look at the gamma.

[Jpjapers]

Thanks for the reply, I've attached a short crop of the problem without giving away to much of the project :-)
You can clearly see the roof and the scifi elements flickr madly.

I found that the scifi object had a missing texture on the network.

The roof however is fine. All texture are located on the network. The machines that render correct are my own workstation and
one of the interns systems (both Ryzen).
I deleted the roofs Fresnel IOR map and now the flickering stopped. Still a weird thing. All versions/plugins are the same.
I'll have a look at the gamma.

So youre saying none of the DR nodes are rendering correctly? Sounds like its a problem with accessing the texture.
You could keep the texture locally and force DR to grab the texture and send it to all of the nodes.

[James Vella]

certainly looks like a texture location problem, one of the machines cannot access the texture.

Also the gamma is being affected, this is most likely related to the first problem though.

Can you identify which machines rendered the problem frames?