Livelink problems

[luckett_jason@hotmail.com]

Hi guys,

I'm having serious problems rendering with Livelink, I have a 6500 frame animation going, it's a pretty heavy scene but mostly Vray proxies, most texture maps are no larger than 2k and mostly jpegs.

So I set the animation of yesterday and check on it this morning and started to notice a weird frame stutter process, it seems to build up to this on long large scene animations, it's like it's lagging, what seems to happen is it renders a frame for 25 seconds, then moves onto the next frame, renders that for 5 seconds, then saves that frame, thus producing noisy images. Oh and every now and then when I stopped it and tried to flush it out and render again it would do that render frame 1 thing, nice.

Could I check with anyone else if they get this?

I used to render with sending the whole file as a large .vrscene but that method is broken nowadays for me.

Any help appreciated.

Jason

[vladimir_krastev]

Hi, thanks for posting. Could you share a couple of frames with the issue for visual reference? Do have ghosting in your frames?
Are you sure you are not experiencing hardware bottlenecks like not enough VRAM, CPU or GPU thermal trolling or texture caching issues due to the filesystem or background processes?
What render settings are you using? Have you tried to separate the 6500 frames into smaller sequences like 1000 frames for example and does that make any difference?
We could run the scene here for a test if you wish. Please archive and send it in the thread or through the support contact form.

[luckett_jason@hotmail.com]

Thanks vladimir_krastev, what I think happens is something is bottlenecking over many frames, btw this never happened when I used to send it as a stand alone file, this old method appears to be broken now (certainly on large scenes). What I also don't also understand is why is there a 30 second frame transfer (frame finishes rendering and then pauses/transfers for 30 seconds), surely it should be instant in livelink, I've gone through the file again and removed any potential path problems.

There is no Forest Pack Camera Clipping or displacement or anything remotely fancy.

With my old method I could render frames at 10 second per frame at 2k, now it's 60-70 seconds via live link.

I'll send a video tomorrow to show you what happens.

Thanks,

Jason

[luckett_jason@hotmail.com]

vladimir_krastev please see link showing one of the problems.

Please watch what is happening, so I send the animation from 1:45pm yesterday and when checking this morning I see the build-up lag problem that Vantage has under livelink.

Frame starts rendering at 3 seconds, continues for 20 seconds and then the frame moves, the quality looks like it resets and then renders for 7 seconds (not hitting the noise level and producing poor frames), then, from 30 seconds until 96 seconds, it just sits there, before, rinse and repeat.

Thanks for taking a look, I sent some images and info to the contact form yesterday.

Jason

[vladimir_krastev]

Hi, thanks for the screengrabs. What version of Forest Pack are you using? We have had issues with the latest one that look very similar to what you are experiencing.

[luckett_jason@hotmail.com]

Forest Pack 9.13, it's happened with both 8 & 9.

[luckett_jason@hotmail.com]

Just checking the animation this afternoon and within 300 frames it had moved to 58% before restarting, this is very frustrating.

[luckett_jason@hotmail.com]

Just sent a portion of the animation overnight and it did 240 frames before just stopping, this is one of the many problems I have with livelink, it also has the massive memory bottleneck problem rearing up again (as above). For me livelink is broken on this file, the only way I can render is to do about 200 frames, then reboot the computer to either clear one of the offending cuplrit's memory issues. This file has no animated meshes as we needed to keep the budget down, the last animation job I did about a year ago had about 100 moving anima people, moving fountains and a waterfall, this was done no problems sending as a standalone file, the standalone method has been broken for some time as well now.

[npg]

this was done no problems sending as a standalone file, the standalone method has been broken for some time as well now.

You said this several times, but you didn't say what is broken in this workflow.

[luckett_jason@hotmail.com]

npg, the standalone file method is broken for me as previously one could send the scene and it would take about 2-3 seconds to send each frame, this was well worth it as it was the only way (at the time) to get moving Anima characters working reliably, also livelink was flakey as anything, even then. Doing it this method there was some setup up time needed, 4000 frames at 2 seconds before transferring to Vantage but, it always worked and render times once inside Vantage were about 10 - 20 seconds per frame, same resolution at 2k.

Now when you try this old reliable method the transfer times balloon up from 2-3 seconds to about 30-60 seconds, alongside this it's flakey as anything, it will mostly error after 100-200 frames. I've tried different cameras, new cameras, importing into a fresh new scene, most things I could think of and nothing has worked.

[npg]

I'm still not sure if the "transfer" times you're referring to are for V-Ray for Max to write a vrscene file or for Vantage to load a frame while rendering the sequence. Is Vantage or Max showing an error after 100-200 frames (a log file could be useful if it was Vantage)?

Does your scene use displacement? This is something that could slow down each frame or lead to out-of-memory errors. Try disabling it if you have it.

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi Jason,

Do you mean that before when rendering from vrscene frames updated way quicker(2-3 seconds) than now(30-60 seconds)? Is the scene you are testing the same? Keep in mind that a lot of supported features has been added to Vantage and with previous versions they were skipped when rendering and thus it is expected to have some slowdown but probably not to this extend. If you could send the scene to our support and say which version works faster so we can compare them.

Best regards,
Alexander

[luckett_jason@hotmail.com]

Hi Alexander.Atanasov ,

It's a different scene, still, I tested the working old scene (different project altogether, lots of moving anima people as explained above) last week and that had the same problem as this, I also tried rolling back Vantage to the correct version at the time (sep 23), the problem still existed. I think I tried it under 3dsmax 25 so I'll try under 3dsmax 24, it might more likely a 3dsmax problem.

Either way sending the complete animation sequence fails now as mentioned above, never mind it's 20 times slower, it still mostly fails, my suspicion is the camera, I've tried creating a new one, no luck. Once I finish this project over the weekend I'll try some extensive testing again, alas, on these large files, it's a very slow laborious process.

One thing I have noticed when rendering is also as mentioned above the deterioration in quality as the animation progresses, it's like it's blocking up memory or something, so simply explained, I reboot my computer to clear memory issues, load up the Max and Vantage scene, hit render animation and approximately every frame starts to back up, so, after 100 frames, it's taking 8-10% of the frame render process waiting and then it starts to render, also, not hitting the noise level preset, hence progressively blurred low quality images. This is particularly noticeable after about 600 frames where it's only now allowing itself 30-40% of the alloted time to render.

Thanks for helping,

Jason

[npg]

We made a speculative change that may help with the issue, but it's a blind change because we don't have a scene to reproduce the issue with. You said you're willing to do some testing again. Please wait a few days for the next patch 2.6.1 (the change is not in 2.6.0).

[luckett_jason@hotmail.com]

Thanks npg, I can try saving the scene, but, it might be a biggie.... The only way to properly test it is to run 200-500 frames in one go. The list of issues I've had with Livelink is truly staggering, I'm genuinely surpirsed it's this bad, I hope it's just this file, but, I very much doubt it, some of these issues were there a year ago on my previous project.