Philby3

Hi Guys
I am trying to find out why we are having all of our render nodes crash, regularly, throughout the process of rendering an animation. Interesting thing is they each render out a frame of the animation then during the Static Raycast Calc phase of the next assigned frame they will generally all fall over (unexpected exception error) then reload the scene and start on the frame they just crashed. They then finish that frame, crash while calculating the next, reload, and so on. Sometimes one or two of them will get through a couple of frames in row, then crash.

Some details:
- Max 9 32bit, Vray 1.5, XPsp2
- 5 x identical render nodes: quad core 2.4, 4GB ram, (3GB switch - on)
- 1 x workstation: quad core 2.6, 4GB ram, (3GB switch - on)
Scene:
- Large fitness centre interior.
- All vray mtl, no displacement.
- 2.5 - 3mill polys
- Sunlight through windows, 4 vray lights (covering whole of ceiling area), handful of light materials
- Irr & LC light settings
- File size is 274mb (not the largest we work with, and the crashing isn't related to just this scene)
- all textures & maps are jpeg except for TV footage on screens (mpg)
- Ram usage during rendering is usually between 2200-2500mb

We have tried the Dynamic setting but this takes 1.5hrs/frame so it is quicker to let them crash after each frame and then complete the frame they were on (1hr for 1st frame, 45min for second - if they don't fall over).

Has anyone seen this before or have any solution?

Hope you can help.

Attached Images

cama0066.jpg (146.7 KB, 27 views)

BrianKitts

Before we upgraded it was normally the high poly scenes that would crash at that point. It's just running out of available memory. Now that we've got 8gigs of ram in each machine I know of a couple scenes that used to always crash at the static raycaster that have no problems now.

Dynamic was always the solution I went with. Do you have all your exercise equipment converted to vrayProxies? The scene looks pretty simple and shouldn't be taking up that much memory.

__________________
Brian Kitts
ANSHEN + ALLEN

jokermuthu

This is Actually very simply, You just have to use 64bit edition.

Please don't ask why? the only reason is just because 64bit can cache large space.

we had ourself this problem and our current configuration is follow:

Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz
Asus Maximus II Formula Mother Board
4 GB RAM
OS Vista 64 Bit edition
3DS max 64bit edition too
HDD 320GB
512 MB DD3 Graphic
and bla bla bla

BrianKitts

Confucius says "do not use a cannon to kill a mosquito"

that scene could easily be rendered on a 32bit system with proper memory management. Yes a 64bit upgrade and more RAM is always an option, but if you don't have a budget for an upgrade, that answer doesn't provide a solution.

PS. quality is measured with pixels, not gigahertz

__________________
Brian Kitts
ANSHEN + ALLEN

philip kelly

Can Iask as a side question what are the biggest models you have ever done.
we have 4gb of ram, and 60 bit quauds, and we have not gone over 120mb, yet.

Can i ask a simple question have you proxied all the exuipment out .

phil