A question and a problem

[Smalerbi]

First I will start with the question. Network rendering, how do I get my rendering slaves to read the IR map?

Now for the problem. I have had many episodes of Max crashing at the static raycast accelerator pass. I'm attempting to run an animation but after a dozen or so frames, Max will pull a disappearing act. I have had this happen on high res stills as well. One file, I spent 26 hours attempting to de-bug the problem with very little luck. It's enough to make you want to go back to scan-line............at least its stable. I would like to know if anyone else has experienced a similar problem.

Thanks,

Scott.

[dbuchhofer]

answer: A. Copy the vrmap to the machine locally, and use the From file looking in the same directory
B. Set up a shared directory on a network, and have the files there.. locate it in the from file with \\computername\directory (Through network neighborhood)

and yes, I've been running into that QUITE often lately, Revisiting older projects, and larger projects.. Generally its a memory issue, but on several jobs it happens regardless of the ram usage.. seemingly at random.. Been trying to track it down in this current scene so as to be able to send something useful to Chaosguys, but no luck~


(Edit, fixed slashes.)

[RErender]

Those crashes are almost certainly memory issues, either not enough, some bad addresses and even heat issues (especially on AMD's). I Highly recommend the "3GB Switch" and using backburner to render with which will let your animations keep rendering after a crash. Of course also render to frames not an avi or a mov.

[Smalerbi]

[quote="dbuchhofer"]answer: A. Copy the vrmap to the machine locally, and use the From file looking in the same directory
B. Set up a shared directory on a network, and have the files there.. locate it in the from file with \computernamedirectory (Through network neighborhood)

Thanks for getting back to me. I'm not sure how to follow your instructions. I will be the first one to admit, when it comes to this type of stuff, I'm not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. I may need a more step by step instruction. You said to copy the vrmap to the machine locally. Are you saying copy this file to each of the rendering slaves and if so, how would each machine know were to find it? I'm also unclear how to set it up through the network neighborhood...........sorry.

Thanks,

Scott.

[dbuchhofer]

Ok, Quickie..

If you're in Windows explorer, are on a network, and (Important.) Have permission from your admin ! you can Right click on a folder, Go to Sharing, Click on New Share, name it, ****Remove the "Everyone" user !!***** from the permissions area, and add in the users you need, with Either Read only access, or Write/Read access..

From then on, you can open up network neighborhood (My network places in win2000) and browse down to the computer you shared the directory on it will show up available by the Computer name.., then into the directory you shared there, If you want to get back to this directory, you'll then want to use the \\ComputerName\SharedDirectoryName way to access it.

Other question.. If you have a vrmap loading From File, the only place the render slave looks for it is in THAT EXACT directory.. For example, if you have a irmap loading from the C:ProjectsMyProjexample.vrmap, there must be that file in that directory on the render slaves to work.

[Smalerbi]

Other question.. If you have a vrmap loading From File, the only place the render slave looks for it is in THAT EXACT directory.. For example, if you have a irmap loading from the C:ProjectsMyProjexample.vrmap, there must be that file in that directory on the render slaves to work.[/quote]


Thanks. I did a small test over three machines and it worked like a charm on two of them. For some reason, I can not get one of the slaves to recognize the vrmap. The machine is set up the same way so I can only assume I'm missing something..........anyway, thanks again for the help.

Scott.

[Junglejuz]

it is possible that hyper-threading might be causing 3dmax to crash after x amount of frames. I had a similar problem and when I disabled hyper-threading in the computer BIOS it stopped crashing.