[Maya] Plugin works, but can't use the VDB's

[Michael Rochefort]

Hello!

I've spent the better part of a few days trying to build the OpenVDB library and it's Maya plugin counterpart. I've finally gotten there with both 4.0.2 and 5.0.0, but there's one little snag left. I can create and load VDB's without issue, but when trying to use the generated VDB's with a render engine (like Arnold or Redshift) Maya crashes nearly instantly. I know Redshift and RenderMan use OpenVDB 3.1.0, and I think Arnold uses 4.0.0 based on the backtrace log. Both versions we're compiled with ABI 3 compatibility (and without for testing) which I assumed would allow this to work, so I don't see what could be causing the issues. The only log data that makes any sense to me is the following output from Arnold:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'openvdb::v4_0_0::RuntimeError'
  what():  RuntimeError: Expected to decompress 1964 bytes, got -1 bytes
00:00:01   916MB ERROR   |   signal caught: SIGABRT -- Abnormal process abort

To my inexperienced eyes this should be working; Evgeny's nodes (from https://soup-dev.com/) are built with 4.0.2. If anyone would be generous enough to take a look, I've supplied the build script used, the CMakeCache file to show which libraries I have and don't have (anything not explicitly stated in the build script is installed from the default system repositories except zlib which I built myself), and the OpenVDB library along with the built Maya plugin including the objects needed to run. I've reached the point where I personally can't figure anything else out.

The last bit of information I can provide is that I built against the VFX Platform 2018 library set. Any necessary libraries not listed there are latest (can be seen in the build script).

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1UqXGJfYwlJzowicXSpl1gNPthCCUE-1f

Cheers,
Mike Rochefort

[dekekincaid.at.gmail dot com]

FYI Maya 2018 is only compiled with vfxplatform 2017. The year of the application release determines the vfxplatform version.

[Michael Rochefort]

Thanks Deke,

Yes, I am aware that Maya was built against the 2017 platform. I was just taking a stab at using the 2018 platform to see if it all worked. Do you think building against 2017 would resolve these issues? I wasn't sure if using the 2018 platform was the issue as everything except compatibility with external engines seemed to be working just fine.

Cheers,
Mike

[Dan Bailey]

Hi,

A bit of a long shot perhaps, but as this is a Blosc compression error, I would try and build using the version of Blosc that Houdini ships with (http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/licenses/index) rather than just picking the latest available version. Blosc should be backwards-compatible, but we have run into issues with using mis-matching versions in the past, so please do flag if this is indeed the problem here. :)

Dan

[Ken Museth]

Hi Dan,

That's not a long shot at all - I'm almost certain you nailed it. I've observed this exact issue related to Blosc compression and the solution is (as you said) to use Blosc (www.blosc.org), version 1.5.0:

https://github.com/Blosc/c-blosc/archive/v1.5.0.tar.gz

Happy holidays!
Ken

[Michael Rochefort]

Hi Dan and Ken,

Thanks for the input, I'll definitely take a look at recompiling the Blosc libraries. Would you recommend building both static and shared libraries? Hopefully I don't need the shared ones.

I wasn't sure which Blosc version to use. The example build script lists 1.7.0 and EPEL has 1.6.1. Wasn't sure if it'd be to old for 5.0.0. Probably should've taken a look through Houdini's dependency list considering it's the primary target for OpenVDB.

Thanks again, I'll report back my findings!

Happy holidays,
Mike

[Michael Rochefort]

Thanks everyone,

I have to do some more testing, but I'm pretty sure I've got everything working. Recompiled everything against VFX 2017 and used Blosc 1.7.0. VDB's currently work great with Arnold, now I need to test with the other engines.

Out of curiosity, how much work is it to add support for Viewport 2.0? For a few minutes I thought my build failed because the VDB's don't show up (or let me sequence write...) in the Viewport 2.0 engine. This is particularly troublesome with Maya 2018 now that Autodesk deprecated and removed the Legacy viewports from the application, unless you specifically enable it.

Cheers,
Mike