099 2017.2620 Material>Geo>Render bug

Hi, happy to be trying out the 099 beta on Mac, have encountered one major problem that I’m not sure if it’s a bug in the software or if perhaps the fault of my graphics card. Sometimes when I have a Phong Material applied to Geometry, things show up ok in Geometry display viewer BUT in my Render TOP it renders only as black constant. Trying other materials leads to same problem. Also strange, when I zoom into Geometry network, the displays of some of the SOPs appear in the same buggy manner, just as silhouetted black constant. In the attached .toe file I was working for a awhile without this bug showing up, then for some reason the Render TOP went black. Anyone have a similar problem?

-Blake

MacOS Sierra 10.12.3
15" MacBook Late 2011
AMD Radeon HD 6770M
test01.toe (6.81 KB)

Also I should add that previously I used TD 077 on same laptop in Bootcamp and never had this problem

Update, still learning about the new PBR material but it seems to be stable and safe from this bug so I switched over to just using that.

The Phong looks correct on the 3 macs I tested on. The SOP viewers show nothing when I load up your file as they all had to be ‘homed’ which you can do by pressing ‘h’ over the viewer when its active. I was only able to test on all GPU types, can’t understand why it wouldn’t work. Do you see a phong torus in the Phong MAT’s viewer?

I also took a look at the rest of your network and noticed how you are driving the Ramp TOP. Technically this works (and the Ramp TOP needs some magic solutions because the numbers are stored in a table, sorry :neutral_face: ) but both the Ramp TOP is a bit slow to cook and the table of python expressions in eval1 is VERY slow to cook. That is too much python to evaluated each frame like that. So I have attached a different approach using a Lookup TOP.

The Ramp is just white to black fed into the first input of the Lookup TOP, then the noise colors are fed into the second input of the Lookup TOP. This will have the effect of the Ramp looking up into the Noise color input for its colors as the ramp goes from 0-to-1. I had to change the Ramp’s Extend Left parameter to Mirror, as you will see there is an artifact at the 0-to-1 transition if you leave it at Repeat. Also, the white to black ramp needs to be set to 16-bit float pixel format so you have enough data to do a nice smooth lookup, you will see roughness in the result if it is left at 8-bit pixel format (found on the common page). These 3 nodes cook in a fraction of the time as the DAT evaluation network.

The mirror does create a wider section of color and some colors repeated. Alternatively you could make the ramp not mirrored and change the ramp’s period to get rid of the 0-to-1 transition. However, then you will need more colors in your Noise color input as the Lookup won’t be going from 0-to-1, so it will skip some colors in the Noise color input. I left that example in there as well (just above) so you can compare and understand what’s happening.

Cheers
test01.2.toe (7.09 KB)

Thanks so much Ben for taking a look at this, I wasn’t so familiar with the Lookup TOP before. I should note that I still get the same problem, however… see attached screen shot of the Render TOP that shows the problem. At this point I’m guessing it must be some side effect of AMD Radeon HD 6770M + new MacOS distribution?? Had never seen this when using 077 in Bootcamp before.

Comparing 077 and 099 isn’t a good test, the entire rendering pipeline has changed. Its more useful test 099 Windows and 099 macOS. Unfortunately we can’t reproduce your problem on any mac we have.

The Radeon 6000 series is below the minimum requirements we’ve set for 099, it could be that this is the problem. macOS doesn’t allow changes to GPU drivers and we are unaware of Apple’s support for older cards like the 6670. They could have just stopped making updates for the older cards and the bugs that are there will remain.

You might be able to run TD on this computer with bootcamp however, since you can update the drivers to the latest available from AMD.

099 System Requirements