Re: MR crashes

["Arvid Björn" <arvidbjorn(at)gmail.com>]

Yeah, I'm using groups of batch frames with our Rush scripts. I was able to render this using simplified geometry and merged objects, so it'll do for now. Good thing these shots are fairly long distance :)

This is not a common thing for me though, I usually get my renders out without glitches and with descent render times. But an instant crash at render-time is something you just can't tackle, except for reworking your setup like we did now.

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 7:15 PM, Joe Laffey <joe(at)laffey.tv> wrote:

On Tue, 20 May 2008, Arvid Björn wrote:

Hey,

I'm rendering particles with instanced objects, and I'm using the rasterizer
because that's seems to be the only way to render anything at all without
crashing really. But on a bunch of frames I get this:

[...]
' INFO : RC   0.3  info : option: pixel preview     off
' INFO : RC   0.3  info : option: lens              off
' INFO : RC   0.3  info : option: volume            on
' INFO : RC   0.3  info : option: geometry          off
' INFO : RC   0.3  info : option: displace          off
' INFO : RC   0.3  info : option: premultiply       on
' INFO : RC   0.3  info : option: colorclip         raw
' INFO : RC   0.3  info : option: outpu Debugging interfaces not available -
debugging is disabled..
FAILED: EXIT CODE=255

Can't really decipher the last line before the fail. It sometimes looks
different, but it just quits instantly. I can render locally, apart from a
few MR crashes and some weird glitches, like random lines across the image
from some particle reaching towards the lower left end of the image. The
actual render is pretty quick, but on the farm it never gets to that stage
of the render. The scene seems simple and straight-forward to me.

What should I be looking for here? This is going to turn into a nightmare if
I need to re-render this when there is less time to spare..

Honestly, this is my beef with Mental Ray, and why we now use it only for really simple scenes (everything else is exported and rendered in Lightwave, because "it just works" (and is a lot faster0). Mental Ray becomes quite unstable with large datasets, even if you are on 64 bit and have gigs of RAM free.

So prepare for this to be a problem. My work around for this same issue was to use Kim Aldis' nice Batchmaker script to render in what he calls "groups" (i.e. render 10 frames at a time and restart XSIBatch, render the next ten frames... etc.) For my heavily instanced scenes I often have to use a group; of just 1-3 frames... Sad.

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