desynchronization warning and sequence frames duplicating

[deepblue812]

Trying to render a fairly long animation (12000 frames) via Livelink and it's giving me repeated 'Sampling counter desynchronized' warnings.

Not sure what this means, but I did notice that the rendered frames seems to be off after a while like the framerates aren't matching up with the original camera/Max scene. For example frame 2200 will render fine, then frame 2201 and 2202 will be the same frame, then 2203 will continue on with the sequence. The further into the animation the more it happens until eventually it's almost every other frame repeating which gives the effect of a very stuttering animation when output. Framerate in Max is set to NTSC if that matters.

[npg]

We've seen reports of this kind of issue. It happens with very large scenes and we haven't properly reproduced and debugged it yet. How big is your scene (file size, RAM and VRAM used)?

The message is new, added in 2.6.1. It tries to ensure that the frame is not noisy due to being restarted by a scene update when it's already halfway rendered. But this doesn't avoid the possibility to have 1 or more whole frames skipped, as you have observed.

[deepblue812]

It's pretty big. The base Max scene file and 6 XRefs add up to about 3.5GB (compressed) along with about another 2GB of scene maps along with a lot of Forest objects for vegetation and highway props. With the scene loaded in Max and Vantage it's getting my RTX3090 to about 22GB memory used (VRAM). Primary RAM usage would generally be around 30-50GB depending on what XRef was on and what maps turned on.

I was able to get it working by saving out everything as .vrscene files, just takes a long time with animated traffic. Once I loaded those into Vantage everything worked smooth and rendered perfect. And without Max opened it only was using about 14GB. Also renders a a lot faster since Live-link isn't waiting for the camera update each frame from Max, which seems to usually add anywhere from 3-5 seconds per frame depending on scene (and sometimes stalls out completely). For now the best workflow seems to be use Live-link while editing the scene and making changes, and then save out .vrscene files for when it's time for final draft output.

[npg]

Great to hear you found a way to make it work. Indeed, this kind of desynchronization issue is only possible in live link.

And Max using 8GB of VRAM just for the viewport... ouch.