last bucket taking for ever! HELP

[yergin]

Hello,
i have 150 frames render. But 11 frame never finished in almost 3 days and still continues. Normaly render time avarage 40-50min by frame. i try to change bucket size 24-16-8-4-2 never fix. if you say someting about material, its not about the material. for example frame 63 its done. but 64 never finish. frame 110done 111 never finish. and stucked buckets are all different places.

3ds max 2020 - update 2020.3.2
vray 3.7.01
win 10 last updated

there is no third part software and all off my software are licenced.

[arne_pursell]

I just had a two-week nearly render, in 1080p, and each frame (with fog) took nearly 4 minutes to render. I reduced the bucket size (I forget the exact number) to around 12-16 and it helped a lot. The more you reduce bucket size or numbers, though, the coarser the picture. So finding a middle ground. It did speed it up. Or maybe it was minimum bucket number, I forget. It's there in the settings. Stuck buckets are a thing with Vray though! 40-50 minutes a frame sounds like you need to optimalize the scene though! Or it could be a bug. Personally I stuck to 12 buckets in 1080p, but then I have 2 servers with 36 cores each working on it. I would look at renting rendering horsepower online, via a render farm, if your pc is that weak. Of course more lights in the scene, fog, etc, all slow down the rendering time. But those last buckets take forever, yes. Due to those stuck buckets it still took me nearly 2 weeks to render a 40 second scene in 1080p with 2x servers with 36 cores and 72 threads each working all the time. Had around 24 vray lights of course. Maybe that makes you feel better! Much easier to optimize the scene and then send to a render farm online.

[Buck]

if you requeue that frame, does it still take that long every time on those same frames? Or is it random frames?

[arne_pursell]

Frames the last ones anyway still take forever. Have 144 threads/buckets working on the scene, but the last few frames still take forever. But not minutes. Doesn't seem to be random anyway. Mostly I did like you did, cut down the number down from 24 to 12 to 10 to 1 finally (which gave a terrible result!) and then back up to 14. That was my reasonable number. I did have 24 vray lights in the scene and environmental fog, so it took with 144 threads still 4 minutes per frame. So around over a week/10 days for a 40 second animation, or around 1000 frames. That was with 2 pc's each with 36 cores working on it. So painfully slow. Cutting out environmental fog would have helped a lot, as well as cutting down the number of lights in the scene. But an underwater scene, so was not an option. Was very hard to cheat this scene with fewer lights.
It pretty much took 4 minutes per frame regardless of where I started the re-rendering. I had to do that constantly to be able to sleep. Rendering pc's in the bedroom and office. Went a bit faster where there were fewer lights in the scene. Rendering times didn't seem to be random, pretty consistent. Noting that I used a master and slave pc to render.
Hope that helps. But those last buckets always take forever to render. There I think a faster pc with higher GHz is probably better than many cores. But the many cores help the initial render go faster. Dunno! Sticking to many cores here. And then tweaking the bucket settings. Good luck!

[ILS]

Common issue, it seems that there is a bad/incompatible material/map in the scene. At least that was our solution. The bucket itself doesn't matter, this usually happens on the last bucket, whatever that bucket happens to end up being.