Render times getting longer

[YoyoBoy]

Over night I ran a low-res animation test of my scene. When I went to bed it was rendering at 7 minutes per frame. When I woke up the rendertime had slowly gone up to an hour per frame. I stopped the rendering and told Max to re-render the last frame that had completed, and it did so in 7 minutes. Can you think of anything that would cause the rendertimes to explode like that?

Thanks.

BTW, my settings for the scene came from SolidRocks, if that helps.

[YoyoBoy]

Just had a thought: maybe it's the point cache. I have several objects with point cache, but they're using single files, not sequential. Will experiment more in a couple hours.....

[YoyoBoy]

Nope, that wasn't the problem. Anyone have any ideas?

[YoyoBoy]

No one has a clue, huh? I think I've narrowed it down to a combination of something SolidRocks is doing along with the animated character I have in the scene. If I delete the character this doesn't seem to happen, nor does it happen when I use Vlado's universal settings with the character. But I really can't beat the speed I get when using SR (initially, at least), so I'd really prefer figure out how to stick with using that.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Solidrocks apply scene settings every time it render scene(from what I remember). Which could mean that there might be some kind of memory leak or dunno. In any case instead of using solidrocks just apply its settings to scene and then stop using it. See if that fixes the problem.

[YoyoBoy]

Yes, I'll be sending the job to a renderfarm service, so that's what I've been doing. Though for some reason I need to apply the settings a couple times before they'll stick. And even then they don't always work as fast as they do when I render right from SolidRocks. It all seems so random that it's really driving me nuts. I feel like I'm dealing with witchcraft. Maybe there's some bizarre ritual or sacrifice I'm supposed to do to get things to work right.

[Morbid Angel]

So you are rendering inside 3ds max ui a sequence? Typically on the farm this would not be an issue since each time 3ds max would be restarted. So try submitting to bb if you aren't and I think there is an option to restart 3ds max between tasks (or is it only in deadline) I can't remember.

Are you using vray3? if so, are you using cache geometry between renders? this could be affecting the sequential rendering.

[YoyoBoy]

I found the problem (finally!!). I guess there were several times that I had used SolidRocks while the Auto Key button was on, which caused some keyframes in the subdivisions of several lights, and over time those became amplified to the point where I had some keys that were over 2,000! I feel so much better now.

[svetlozar.draganov]

Glad to hear you sorted it out

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Wow thats good to know. Glad u got it sorted! Damn renders must look so clean at the 2000 subd

[^Lele^]

if it wasn't for the adaptive routines (ie. Arn-cough!-old), the buckets in the last frames would still be trying to make sense of the image.
Light a candle to Vlado and Peter for coming up with the technique.