Animation Hanging On Every Frame

[staddon]

Hello,

I'm currently rendering an animation with the progressive image sampler. I've set the render time to 5 min, but it's taking 10 min per frame. I know it's not always exact, but it's usually pretty close. Double is going to create some problems for our schedule.

During the "Rendering image" phase the progress bar gets almost all the way to the end (it does say "done") and then stops. I get a blue wheel, and the VFB goes grey. Screenshot of the Rendering progress bar is attached. It does this for about 5 min and then eventually moves on to Writing Output which takes only a couple seconds. I do have it saving to a network location, so maybe it's having trouble finding the server for some reason? Never had this issue before, and I would think that it would be stuck in the Writing Output phase if that were the issue, but that's just guessing. Furthermore, this is happening on two different machines, so I have to assume it's the file or the server.

Has anyone else encountered this issue? Any ideas?

Thanks,

Jinmu

V-Ray Next 1.1
3ds Max 2017

UPDATE: I canceled a frame and it's taking the same amount of time for it to respond. Must be something wrong with the file. There are a lot of objects in the scene and we're using a lot of RailClone objects. Could that be the issue?

[Vizioen]

Does it calculate lens effects or denoise?

[staddon]

Hi Ashley,

I don't think I have any lens effects, and I don't have the denoiser element, just a couple multimattes. It does save the rendering and elements fine eventually (saving as separate .tiff's).

I tried rendering the file again with all of my RailClones off and there was no issue. I don't know if that means that there is an issue with RC or if it's just that I removed a ton of geometry. Would really suck either way though, since we're using RC and ForestPack more an more as our projects continue to get more ambitious.

[staddon]

Ok, so I've narrowed it down to specifically the RailClone fence preset. It has geometry for the chainlinks and we're trying to render an aerial view of an industrial building, so it's probably just wayyy too much geometry. You can barely see the fence at this distance from camera, so I'm just going to make a plane with an opacity map to replace the chainlink part of the objects.

[Vizioen]

Yeah that would be much faster. I tend to avoid built in RC or FP presets, because they aren't really optimized to my needs and if something would go wrong, like this for instance you wouldn't know why exactly.

[staddon]

Replacing the high poly segments of the fence with an opacity mapped plane has done the trick. Will take some time to get it to render the way I want, but at least my schedule isn't blown. Thanks for your comments Ashley.