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bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

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Clayton Krause

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bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostFri Dec 01, 2017 11:48 pm

I've seen a few posts on this dating back from ~2014 and it doesn't seem like the bSpline is any more stable in 2017. Any details or possible solutions to make the bspline a bit more stable? I'm getting crashing every five minutes trying to rotoscope a 5k image now, but this has happened since I've started using fusion a few months ago.

BMD Fusion 9 studio (latest available download)
Win10
Wacom intous large
GTX 1080
Dual 12 core xeons @ 3.0 ghz.

The concept of the bspline is awesome, but not very usable (for me) in this state. Any help would be great! Also I might mention that after the 50th or so point, the image viewer slows way down when moving around. Thanks.
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Bryan Ray

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostSat Dec 02, 2017 6:34 am

I haven't noticed any particular instability with BSpline, but I also don't make splines with so many anchors. 50+ points seems like quite a lot, and it makes me think that perhaps you should be breaking your subject into smaller pieces and/or taking advantage of the weight control. Hold W and drag to the right to increase the weight of an anchor. That prevents needing to cluster points to get a corner.

The new interface tech in Fusion 9 seems to be significantly slower than previous versions. I've particularly noticed it when using 4-corner Trackers. When the splines are visible, the interface latency is extremely high. Complex splines would likely suffer the same fate.
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Clayton Krause

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostSat Dec 02, 2017 6:50 pm

Weight control is working nicely and I think breaking up the subject into smaller pieces is a good bit of advice. Using weight control more is helping with the crashes although they still happen from time to time.

It seems like fusion hiccups when keys are created on the bSpline close to other keys. As if it can't resolve the operation possibly getting confused with the key right by the one you are creating.. Anyways, still better than doing this in photoshop or spending my life savings on Nuke.

I started using fusion several months ago and I'm really enjoying the flexibility of it. Scripting in it is awesome and having the Fusion file be all code based, referencing in the images, not embedding them is really, really useful. Cheers.
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Bryan Ray

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostSun Dec 03, 2017 6:13 am

Some general advice for roto (and this may be stuff you already know—apologies if so):

Create separate shapes for rigid segments of your subject. The forearm and upper arm should be two different shapes, for example. Frequently a small flexing shape for the elbow should also be added. Try to move points as a group rather than individually. Hold T to rotate, S to scale uniformly, X and Y to scale in just those directions.

Keep points associated with particular features on those features as much as possible. If an anchor moves up and down the arm over the course of the shot, that's what causes crawling in your matte.

Identify primary movement first, and set keyframes at the extremes, adding more keyframes only as necessary. Fewer keyframes means less chatter. Identify points of rotation and use them to your advantage. For instance, The forearm rotates from the elbow, so align your spline to the elbow first, then rotate it into place; you'll find your intermediate frames are much more accurate. Some 2d character animation principles are applicable to rotoscoping.

Don't try to roto negative space. It's much easier to get a matte for a person and subtract it from the matte of a window than to try to make a spline for the window and the edge of the person.

Sometimes a luma key will get detail that's too fine to roto effectively. For flapping coats or hair, sometimes painting the mask frame by frame with Mask Paint is actually faster than wrangling a spline.

Name your nodes! When you come back to a shot after two weeks doing other things, you'll thank yourself for the organization.
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Clayton Krause

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostSun Dec 03, 2017 10:07 pm

Thank you for the advice. I'm not versed in roto so all of that is good information. I was able to use one of the keyers for my subjects hair already which worked out very well.

I wasn't doing any roto for animation, only stills. The goal was to paint depth masks in fusion which worked out well with the gradient background being masked by the various rotos.

Still, Fusion kept on crashing on me very frequently. I turn off update when I'm using the bSpline to not get a resolution shift while working, but still, crashed a lot. Much better though after lightening the load of the keys and using the weight option you recommended in your previous most.

To be fair, the resolution I was working at was between 5-8k on some of the images I was rotoscoping. Also the shapes were more complex I suppose too. Below is an example of one. Thanks again for all the help.

Image
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Sander de Regt

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostSun Dec 03, 2017 10:12 pm

'resolution shift'? That sounds like you have 'auto proxy' set to on, since that's the only option that I know of that changes the resolution while working on it. I am not sure if that's the way to get the best result of your masking. Same for turning off update. How do you know if your mask is working if you don't view the result. Also: you could consider using 'normal' polygons instead of B-splines, since they tend to be more stable than B-splines. Of course B-splines shouldn't crash either, but when it's about getting your job done now, maybe 'should' isn't the most important part of the equation. :-)
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Clayton Krause

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostSun Dec 03, 2017 10:19 pm

Thanks for the reply. I was rotoscoping still images. Not frames. Turning the update to "None" (vs all or some) still retains the image. The bSpline still updates as a trace, but nothing resolves. This allowed me to punch out the masks and then turn on update to proof them.

I'll check out the "auto proxy" to see about turning that on/off. A question while we are on the topic (sort of), is there some adaptive resolution function inside of fusion like AE? That would be nice when modifying things like background ramps to let me know if I'm in the ballpark before final resolve.

Also I was leveraging some of the cache features on the bSpline rotos that were done so fusion didn't resolve them when they didn't need to be resolved (I think I saw nodes resolving even when "some" was ticked and the modifications were being done way up-tree of those bspline/merge nodes that were resolving, but weren't being modified).

Still learning! Coming from After Effects to Fusion and I am really liking it. Entertained the idea of Nuke, but you can't beat 300 dollars vs something like $9000 for Nuke Studio. It sort of blows my mind that The Foundry can price gouge like that. Even Fusion's old pricing for 1200 or so bucks was totally a steal when compared to Nuke. Thanks again.
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Clayton Krause

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostMon Jun 25, 2018 2:17 pm

Hey all,

Fusion 9.0.2 build 15
Win10 - Fully up-to-date

I've been learning loads about Fusion since my last post about the bSpline crashing. Since updating to Fusion 9.0.2 build 15 the stability of the bSpline tool seems to have improved, however, it still does frequently crash.

I've gotten the in the habit of saving before every bSpline use since there seems to be a 50/50 chance of the tool crashing Fusion. I've even turned Update Nodes option from "some" to "none" during the use of the bSpline tool to hopefully make Fusion handle it better.

Anyways, still have more issues than I think I should be having with this tool. Since it's the go-to masking tool (from what it seems to be in Fusion), I'd hope that someone here can push bSpline stability concerns up to the devs to check out.

As a side note, I'm not making 100 anchor points in my bsplines. Using points very sparingly and trying to use interpolation (weighting) of those points as best I can for optimization.

Crash. Crash. Crash. :( It just crashed on me now hence writing this post ).

bSpline only ever crashes when I'm using the tool to draw out a mask. After the mask is complete, stability with the bSpline tool becomes a concern no longer.

Thanks for any help in this regard. Fusion is treating me really well so far, but this is a bit of a thorn in my spine every time I use Fusion.
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Clayton Krause

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostMon Jun 25, 2018 2:51 pm

Probably important to add that I'm using the bspline tool with an intous pro wacom tablet. I don't know if that affects the situation at all.
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Bryan Ray

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostMon Jun 25, 2018 5:10 pm

My suspicion is there's a problem with Fusion's interaction with your graphics card. Are you on the latest driver? Fusion can be sensitive to driver versions, and it sometimes manifests in unusual ways. Sometimes if you have graphics-related issues, it can even be helpful to step back to an older driver that may not have the particular quirk that causes the bug.

BSpline isn't OpenCL accelerated, and you're only seeing crashes while manipulating the spline in the Viewer, so it's likely not a problem with the tool itself but with the Viewer. If so, you should see a similar problem if you instead use the Polygon tool, which makes Bezier splines.

Again, I haven't noticed any instability with BSpline on either of the workstations I use, but one of our other artists was recently complaining about frequent crashes during rotoscoping, so maybe I'm just lucky.
Bryan Ray
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Clayton Krause

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostMon Jun 25, 2018 5:23 pm

@Bryan - Do you run a Wacom tablet in a windows env at all? It's just a speculation, but I think that might be the issue as I don't experience as much of an issue with using a mouse. I wonder if bSpline is getting choked up on an accidental rapid tap or something along those lines (Just a thought).

Right now I have four GTX 1080ti cards in my system at work (all monitors plugged into one card on the first PCIe slot.) My home system has 1 1080 (running all monitors) and 3 1080ti cards.

Driver version for both machines is 398.11 which is the current one. Had to update to the most current for Redshift renderer.

Normally I keep my drivers up to date, but this has been a long term issue I've been experiencing through many of the GTX 1080 series drivers.

I'll add that the issue seemed to of gotten better from 9.0.0 - build unknown to 9.0.2 Build 15 (what I currently am running).

I suppose I'll just force myself to use the mouse to draw my bspline masks and if that doesn't make a different I'll switch to the polygon tool with Wacom tablet and see if I get crashes on that too.

If I can figure out a way to get solid, stable bsplines I'd be a happy camper. Fusion is top notch.

Thank you for the reply.
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Bryan Ray

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostTue Jun 26, 2018 12:37 am

Clayton Krause wrote:@Bryan - Do you run a Wacom tablet in a windows env at all? It's just a speculation, but I think that might be the issue as I don't experience as much of an issue with using a mouse. I wonder if bSpline is getting choked up on an accidental rapid tap or something along those lines (Just a thought).


Yes, I have an Intuos 2 at work and a 4 at home.
Bryan Ray
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JP Docherty

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostTue Jun 26, 2018 6:45 am

Unfortunately I have to report that I've been seeing this crash for years - it happened occasionally on fu7, seemed to get worse on fu8 and is pretty much the same on fu9. And that's with me using a mouse most of the time, although I have seen it when I use a Wacom as well. So I guess it's not really Wacom related, I'm afraid.

The systems involved are win 10, i7, quadro graphics (K3100m and dual M4000 mostly) and I've kept the drivers updated. I can also confirm that it seems to happen when creating the spline or inserting points - and like yourself I've learned to save the comp before creating any spline as the odds are at least 50/50 I'll get a crash.

On a possibly unrelated front but offered in case it gives the BMD developer guys a clue - I've noticed on fu9 when you have created a 2D tracker and tracked some points, turning off the tracker or turning the tracker to inactive (using the checkbox in the tracker node gui) very often generates a crash that seems similar.
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Clayton Krause

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostTue Jun 26, 2018 1:45 pm

Alright,

So it's not just me being anomalous with Fusion. Other folks are experiencing instability (or at least one more, haha).

How does this get pushed up the food chain at BMD to get it on the radar of the developers to take a critical look? Are there any Fusion crash logs that get generated that I can submit to help debug?

It sounds like this bSpline instability has been a longer running issue with Fusion for some that pre-dates the release of version 9 (my only familiarity with the software).

Fusion is GREAT, but bSpline tool is necessary for most of my work. Instability here isn't just a minor inconvenience. I only use Fusion for general comping so I spend about 15% of my time in the software as a 3d Generalist.

If I were a true-blue compositing artist, I'd be going absolutely insane. If I were a roto artist I would of tossed my computer out the window by now and sold my left kidney on the black market for a license of Nuke.

Thank for corroborating my story @JP Docherty. :)
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Sander de Regt

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostTue Jun 26, 2018 2:07 pm

bSpline has been hit and miss for me for years, but it never affected me as much, because I had always used Bezier Splines for roto from before they were implemented, so I just never made the switch.
To get it up the food chain, see if it is also unstable under Resolve and post it in the beta section.
That part is closely watched and since the underlying architecture is the same, I'd guess that any improvements made to ReFusion or FuSolve or DaVusion would trickle down to regular Fusion as well eventually.
Sander de Regt

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Clayton Krause

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Re: bSpline - Fusion 9 - crashing a lot

PostTue Jun 26, 2018 2:14 pm

Can anyone speak to the stability of the public beta of Resolve? I've been intentionally waiting for the first official version to come out before making the switch.

If Resolve is as light, optimized and as well put together as Fusion, I'll install it without hesitation on my production workstation. Last time I installed beta Maya 2016.5 on my production workstation all hell broke loose and I ended up having to reinstall Windows. :/

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