32bit Displacement not rendering on Maya 2008 farm

[heikovfx]

Hi guys, has anyone else come accross this problem. I'm trying to render a scene in maya 2008. It sources a 32bit displacement map. Our farm used to have maya 8.5, and the scene rendered fine, we upgraded a couple of days ago, and since then it no longer uses the displacement map. On the ZBrush formus they say "appearently Autodesk put in a new "feature" in the preferences that needs to be switched ON for Maya 2008 to properly render zbrush exported 32bit displacement maps!

Window > Settings/Preferences > Preferences > Settings > Rendering > Mentalray Preferences > Use Maya-style alpha detection on file textures."

Ok, I did this on my local machine and the scene renders fine, I also set it on all the machines on the farm, but these are preferences within maya, which obviously are not taken into account when rendering maya batch, so it still renders without displacement. Has anyone found a solution for this, and does the fault lie on Autodesk, or Royal Render' side.

[schoenberger]

The fix/workaround for this problem is to load the texture file into photoshop or comp application and create an alpha channel.
It was either a white alpha or grayscale equal to the RGB channels.

Then the new "feature" is not affecting your texture, as Maya does not have to emulate an alpha channel.
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Holger Schönberger
Binary Alchemy - digital materialization