Error stopping Carrara while rendering

Mosk the Scribe

I have a scene with a terrain, which has some replicated trees and plant props.  There are two trees, and both are animated.  (file size fairly small, loads quickly)

I also added two genesis figures who are dressed and animated. (file size for those two is just under 4GB; loads and saves slowly (can take 30 seconds or so) ) 

When I tried to render this at 1920 x 1080, I would get a non specific error message and Carrara would stop the render - could happen anywhere from 1-5 frames, both when rendering inside carrara and through the queue render.

Just made the genesis figures invisible, and that seems to be rendering so far (up to frame 8, with each frame taking 33 seconds)

I'm only using a couple of lights - and no atmosphere.

Any suggestions on why this would fail?  (are two dressed genesis figures - one with Carrara hair, but NOT dynamic/animated, the other with standard hair prop - pushing it?

Or are animating carrara plants/trees likely the source of the problem?

For this scene, I can get by rendering figures and rest separately, but hard to plan use of Carrara when hit errors like this that stop things dead and give no inormation beyond 'error'

(also dumped unused objects and shaders, and consolidate shaders before starting)

Have a Windows 10 Pro, with 32RAM, i7 Quad Core, 3.5GHz, and an old nVidia GeForce GTX 660

If I hit CTRL ALT Del to watch the task manager whilc Carrara renders (now on frame 24 rendering pngs files) Carrara uses anywhere from 14% to 99% of the CPU, while the file itself says 2718.6 MB (that's with the two genesis figures visibility turned off)

Thanks for any suggestions / tips

 

Mistara

i would first troubleshoot the shaders.

a too complex procedural.  overly large texture file . tif or hdri file

Mosk the Scribe

Just tried my two genesis figures - and that shut down right away without rendering successfully.

If it is a shader issue, any way to home in on the problem other than shutting things off and rendering without them?  Would be a whole bunch of texture files to check manually (if that is indeed the problem)

Would it potentially help to cut the amount of frames rendered, doing the first three seconds as one file, and last three as another?  (or is that largely irrelevant?  Didn't know if Carrrara tries to store full duration in memory and chokes on that, or if runs out of resources on an individual frame)

Other likely culprits?

Does rendering 1920 x 1080 put more of a strain on system than lower res or does that just take more time to render?

Is rpf harder than png on system?

Anything I can monitor while rendering to get a sense of why things are failing?

Thanks for any help

Stezza

if you have any props in the scene attached to a figure then one of them could be causing it as well... happens to me sometimes but on stills not animations.

TangoAlpha

Could be the trees - sometimes trees will halt a render with some sort of loop or index error. especially at larger render sizes, and if they're ramified or hybrid shapes.

Mosk the Scribe

Having anoterh render problem on a short, simple animation wtih the two Genesis figures - no animated trees; no global illumination; have depth of field Off; - trying to render closeups of genesis face while morphing teeth and using shaders ops 2 multi-mixer to animate between a nice and nasty teeth texture.

I've closed my other programs, emptied DAZ Temp, cleared out unused objects / shaders / dups - and render still crashes after one frame (only 800 x 800 px).

I did notice that the teeth/mouth/gums  used a fairly large texture at 3000px by 3000 px - 

Tried again with Task Manager open, and Carrara goes from just about 15% CPU usage up to high 90s with each rendered frame, and memory is about 4200MB (the genesis figures seem to generate such large files - don't know if that's a big part of this unpredictabilitity)  

Anyway, seems to be chugging through the render this time *each frame only takes about 5 seconds to render, but I guess it can be demanding on Carrara in other ways.

(I do have a West Park building structure in the scene as well, but visibility is currently uturned off, so didn't think tat would be part of it)

Thanks for any further suggestions on troubleshooting errors during rendering.

And is there a setting in preferences to automatically downsize large texture files - someone mentioned earlier that texture size could be a  problem; and I do see Carrrara occasionally throw a warning that it reduced a texture size it deemed inappropriate for the scene - not sure what algorithm is being used though or how to get more control over it.

Thanks

Dartanbeck

Rendering should peg your cpu threads to 100% while rendering.

Large texture files, and a lot of them might be an issue, I suppose. One thing I always try to do is to consolidate duplicate shaders - and even beyond that, shader that use the same texture maps - I try to (as much as possible, within reason) make them use the same shader to further consolidate - but that's not to keep Carrara from Not Rendering, just to keep my crap-top from blowing up on me.

It seems that, since the advent of Iray and PAs using things like Substance Painter to create PBR texture maps that we can easily use the same shader for everything using the same color map, since the metalness (I use in Shininess channel) and specular (Highlight) maps control them enough to NOT require separate shaders. If the shiny objects need a tweak, the same tweak often works well with the rest of the materials using that shader at the same time.

For example, if the metalness (often also called roughness) map goes all the way to white (as they often do), I'll lower the brightness of that map to 30 or 40, maybe 50. That number being the highest number I would otherwise be putting in the Shininess channel's slider for the shiniest surface. Since it's a grayscale map, the less shiny surfaces will also benefit from this brightness setting.

Of course there are always exceptions - in which case I just use that separate shader.

More things to consider:

I know you're saying that you're not using GI, etc., but that doesn't really mean much. We can easily have render settings that are more taxing on the render than GI or IL via reflections, refractions with really high maximum raytrace values, caustics, alpha maps with lights that use features that have to read those transmaps as geometry (like cone effects, for example) along with other interactions that have to deal with treating geometry as invisible.... 

Sometimes even just having geometry with various specific shader settings intersecting one another (for example with reflections, refraction, transparency, etc., etc.,) might just be the bringer of bad news.

Stuff like West Park products should be just fine. Just always try to remember to consolidate duplicate shaders when bringing anything in from the library. It's fine to have these giant texture maps, but when there are lots and lots of shader domains, each one loads in with a separate shader and, if not consolidated, will ask the engine to load those same textures as many times as there are individual shaders, which can easily cause the program to run out of usable RAM. 

Some elements in my scenes are just supposed to be some kind of specific substance, like a metal or glass or something like that. If I have a bunch of things that are the same substance, I'll often replace their original shader with a Carrara one, and use that shader for everything of the same material. For eaxample, Rosie wears clothing that has rivets and metal rings. I make those like a bronze-like material, but without reflections. I use a highlight and shininess to simulate a bit of reflection without there actually being any. So then, if I load something else into the scene that can use that same metal, I copy the top level of the shader from Rosie's clothing, and paste it into the metal shader of that other object (after alreay consolidating so that the change affects all domains using it) and then consolidate again. 

Not sure if any of this is related to your specific issue, but thinking along these lines will certainly help for future endeavors. I know that using these sorts of practices have made it possible for me to take tiny tidbits of time and be able to very esily get a relatively large scene put together and optimized, saved and rendered - all within that lack of time.

Dartanbeck

Whoa... sorry for the lengthy babble

Mosk the Scribe

Not babble at all - appreciate the thorough reply.  Even if those potential problem spots don't apply to this particular project, it's good to know for the future.

Thanks. 

Dartanbeck

My pleasure. I have some rather large, busy scenes with no more than twenty-some shaders in them. It's amazing! And fun!

WendyLuvsCatz

it can also happen if Carrara loses access to the files needed that are stored outside the car file and or access to the disc you are writing to

and never write to the DAZ temp folder ever, I have had hundreds of images just vanish just playing the preview from that folder, not closing and also saving, it does not purge some things but is over zealous on others,

also make sure no FAT discs involved esp using genesis as the save  files exceeed 4GB quite often