Missing chunks of geometry while rendering

[Justin_Carlson]

Hello,

I am having a strange issue with Arnold for Houdini.

On some of my frames, only part of the geometry loads and then suddenly cuts off. It's not at the edge of a bucket in the rendering grid, it just seems to be that Arnold stops loading the geo but continues to render. its really strange and only happens to about 6 random frames out of several hundred. I am loading an alembic file, however I have cached the head and it still happens.

I have attached an image of what is happening. The head will be fine on the frame before and after this one, and the issue shows up in IPR render as well.

I appreciate any help!

Justin

[adrien.herubel]

Hi Justin,

Is this happening in pure batch rendering, or only in IPR, while scrolling the timeline ? Does the problem go away if you restart the Arnold session (without changing the frame) ?

Could you share the alembic cache if possible ? I would like to try to repro this problem.

[Justin_Carlson]

Hello Adrien,

The issue was happening in pure batch rendering as well as the IPR. I restarted the program and opened the file and it would still occur.

After taking a much needed break, I found the cause of my issue. It is the earring on the other side of the head. The earrings are copied to points on each ear, referenced from an object merge with the head as input. For some reason, unless I pack the geometry, the earring forces itself to be shown to the camera on random frames. I have now packed the earrings and the issue has been resolved. Although I am unsure why this would happen.