Particles render as giant blocks.

[fm.illuminatus]

So, I created a nice, relatively light (750 particles per second) rocket engine flame for a spacecraft I'm working on. I test rendered the flame on one of the engines, it looks great.

Now, there are 16 engines on this spacecraft, so I grouped the emitter and the cloud under a null, then duplicated the group 16 times. Again, looked at the flames in the preview region. They work correctly and look great.

Now comes the final render. My amazing engine flames? RENDERED OUT AS WHITE BOXES. And that's only half of them. The other half render out as messed up version of the flames I created, with chunks missing. I figured, maybe it's just too many particles for the stupid program; so I increased the cell size to 2, the texture memory up to 8192, the sampling size on raytracing to 1 / 4 with 0.9 for quality, and cut the number of particles down to 250 pps. Guess what? It's still rendering stupid white boxes!!

Please someone, what's going on here? Help!

[fm.illuminatus]

No one knows the answer to this? No one has ever had particles render out as giant cubes?

[ActionArt]

You have no particle shape node attached (or it's not set up right). I'm not at my comp right now but there is fairly good documentation on how to set it up and also tutorials on SI Wiki (and hundreds of others).

[fm.illuminatus]

You have no particle shape node attached (or it's not set up right). I'm not at my comp right now but there is fairly good documentation on how to set it up and also tutorials on SI Wiki (and hundreds of others).

Are you sure? The particles render fine in the preview render, just not the final render. The particles are all spheres, and set as such. Why do I need an extra shape node?

Because you said so, and not because it made any rational sense, I went ahead and attached a shape node to two of the 16 pclouds. ALL the white boxes (on all the clouds) went away. Again, this is totally irrational. But now there is a different problem. The particles are still "messed up". Instead of appearing as a normal volume, they are plastered like "textures" onto whatever happens to be the nearest geometry. Any fix for this?

(Thanks for the help, btw.)

[xsisupport]

No one knows the answer to this? No one has ever had particles render out as giant cubes?

Just a guess, but maybe duplicating everything is the source of the problem.
I never had a support case about this while I was at Autodesk.
btw, most people here probably don't have the time to repro your problem by building a scene from scratch.

[ActionArt]

I highly recommend going through some of these tutorials. You'll likely find whats wrong fairly quickly.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/it ... eID=123112

[fm.illuminatus]

I highly recommend going through some of these tutorials. You'll likely find whats wrong fairly quickly.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/it ... eID=123112

While I appreciate the answer, I find the assumption that I don't know at all what I'm doing slightly irritating. I've gone through these tutorials several times, I'm a subscriber to digital tutors already. If the answer was there, I would have found it. It's not.

I'm getting the general impression that the particle system in Softimage is buggy and not very robust. Further, I'm also getting the idea that most people, when they encounter problems of these sort, they just delete the scene or start from scratch (which I've done for particle issues in the past)... and no one really knows why half of these kinds of problems happen. Am I wrong?

[Kzin]

I'm getting the general impression that the particle system in Softimage is buggy and not very robust.

it would need some things to improve the current situation i think. particles performance in 3d view is really bad, volume shading needs a completely rewrite and also the si core i think, its a pain in the ass to handle scenes with 100 mio particles, management/performance wise. ice is capable to create these amounts and more, but the handling in si is a pain.

everytime i tryed to render volume particles i had the problem that the bounding box shadow was rendering, so its impossible to use this for compositing when you also have alpha issues with the box. the whole thing needs a rewrite i think. not sure this will happen. you can create alot of particles, but thats it, you cant work with them further (except for motion graphics or instancing, but instancing itself is buggy like hell).