Problems rendering XGen in Gaffer

[Carlo Giesa]

Hi there!

I'm trying to setup my environment in a way to be able to render XGen inside Gaffer. I have the impression that the XGen procedural has a particular setup that needs almost the entire Maya libraries to run with like explained here.

I do not really like to have all Maya libraries in my LD_LIBRARY_PATH since it is very possible that there might be conflicts with other tools. There are all Qt and python libraries that get shipped with Maya and also tbb.

With latter, I get an error message when launching Gaffer:

Error: mayaCollision::initialize: Invalid TBB runtime interface version 10005 (must be >= 10006).

But Gaffer starts anyway and I can test renders etc. So, I'm not sure if that is really an issue. I already did report this issue when trying to run Gaffer from a subprocess from within Maya. I could work around by manipulating the environment and removing anything related to Maya. But I cannot do it here, since I need the libraries to have a working procedural.

And I'm still trying to figure out the setup of my external procedural to have XGen going through Gaffer to Arnold. For now, I still get error messages that I try to render NULL objects. XGen is recognized and I get some output from it in my terminal that looks like this:

10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    Importing 1 samples for collection 
10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    Importing[0]: /uvfx/Projects/testa/asset/default/character/bob/work/lookdev/primary/maya/scenes/testa_bob_lookdev_primary_v001_001__collection.xgen 
10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    File Version: 18 
10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    Importing collection 
10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    Name set to: collection 
10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    Importing description 
10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    Name set to: description 
10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    Done importing description: description 
10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    SplinePrimitive made active. 
10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    RandomGenerator made active. 
10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    RendermanRenderer made active. 
10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    GLRenderer made active previewer. 
10:42:27 XGen Debug(1):    Done Importing collection file. 
10:42:27 XGen Error:       Failed to open file and the fallback attempts also failed: /uvfx/Projects/testa/asset/default/character/bob/work/lookdev/primary/maya/scenes/testa_bob_lookdev_primary_v001_001__collection.abc

The problem is that the abc file does not exist, but I don't know why XGen generated the data attribute pointing to that abc file although it does not exist. When I remove this from my data string, it says that it misses the geometry.

So, my first question: What do you think about this tbb error?

And my second: Did anyone manage to render XGen inside Gaffer and how?

Thanks for any hint!

Greets,

Carlo

[Carlo Giesa]

Ok, after fiddeling around with the xgen export (need to load AbcExport to have the abc file, which makes pretty much sense, but XGen does not tell me that) I could manage to render XGen from Gaffer. But I'm still worried about the Maya libraries in my environment and the tbb error on startup. Any idea about that?

Greets,

Carlo

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[John Haddon]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 10:09 AM 'Carlo Giesa' via gaffer-dev <gaffe...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

But I'm still worried about the Maya libraries in my environment and the tbb error on startup. Any idea about that?

I share your concerns! We're overdue a TBB update in Gaffer and are hoping to squeeze one in for 0.61, so that should help. But generally I think it would be wise to be wary, and consider the mixing as a possible source of any strange behaviour you might encounter. I know of at least one studio where XGen was a continuous source of misery for this reason...

[Carlo Giesa]

Hi John!

Thanks for your feedback! It's funny, since last time, you said the same thing about 0.60.x releases. ;-) But no worries! I actually could work around the issue by creating a custom gaffer executable, only for projects that need XGen support (I hope as less as possible). I still get the error on Gaffer startup, but I could do my tests without any problems. I guess that Maya libraries are complaining since they expect a more recent TBB version. But I hope/guess that those libraries are not really used a lot/at all by the xgen procedural.

I just checked and those are the following TBB versions used by Maya:

2020.4: TBB 2018u6

2022.2: TBB 2020u2

And Gaffer uses TBB 2018u5.

Between TBB 2018u5 and u6, there is almost no change and should normally only concern Windows. So, I guess that this conflict should not really be a big issue. But it is still an error and not a warning, so it worries me a bit.

I keep you posted when I discover more on that subject.

Thanks,

Carlo

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