Problem with animating multiple frames.

[TSOLAKISARCHITECTS]

Hello chaos forum!

This is my first post here,

i'm currently doing my first steps in animation with 3ds max and vray and im running into an issue i cant understand.

I am using 3ds max 2021 and vray 5 latest version, forest pack, railclone, anima software for animating people and i have some custom animations of cars. I try to render around 1200 frames
with very basic setup in vray almost default settings. All starts well, i am rendering multi frames not avi, and the frame buffer is storing them correctly. Around frame 27 about 2.20 minutes in (tried it 4 times)
i get this message (see uploaded photo). At that point either the light cache never ends (i woke up this morning with a light cache building over 4 hours when usually takes a minute) or max crashes.

One thought that i had is that i am running out of RAM (i have 64GB of ram, and each frame is around 80-90% of that) but then again, wouldnt it be running out from the first frame? Does each frame increase the need of ram?

If anyone can help me, or understands what the hell this message from the log means i would really apprieciate it.

I am running windows 10 pro, all files are loading from our office server. There are some assets mentioned in the log file (some car wheel proxies etc) but all of these render out fine if i try to render these frames seperately).

[StufishIT]

Thinking back to my early mistakes, I guess you are using an light cacheing solution suitable for fly-thoughs where only the camera moves between frames, not animations, the cache is being added to at every frame and the increasing cache size is blowing your computer's tiny mind at frame 27. Try looking for a V-Ray animation render setting.

[TSOLAKISARCHITECTS]

Stufisshit thanks for the reply mate! I was using the setup that i use for still images to be honest, which is typical brute force primary and light cache secondary. The only difference i made was selecting "animation" instead of "still" for the light cache preset which from what i understands basically just alters the subdivs and the retrace. From reading what you wrote the only thing i could find in the settings is the "dont delete" button that was ticked on in the light cache options. So i unticked that, which means that now the light cache will not be stored i guess? I am gona give this a go to see if anything changes, i have to wait a couple of hours to see...! Thanks for your reply! I've looked for many tutorials but they are mostly older with irradiance and saved maps which is not really up to it for vray 5 so i didnt try them

Edit:

Nah this change that i tried didnt affect anything, the problem still comes up the same.

[TSOLAKISARCHITECTS]

Ok, so i've tested the same scene with double the RAM (128GB of ram) and it does the same thing, only now it takes twich as long to take up all the RAM which is logical. It seems like every frame gets stored in the ram or something, which i dont understand since i am not saving an AVI file, im saving individual frames. If anyone can help that would be super nice, i have no idea what to do

[Anthonyyg]

Its hard to say without seeing the scene or the frames. Try setting both the Primary and the secondary engines to Brute force and and then set the noise threshold to 0.05 or similar to obtain a reasonable render time to test your frames.
Otherwise reset the render settings to the default and change just the light cache preset to animation to rule out any erroneous settings.
Going off previous posts you can see if the "Conserve Memory" setting in setting>system helps. Also bucket rendering will use less memory too.
From there if you still have issues you can try using the V-Ray scene convertor to remove any trouble some materials.
Finally debugging start by replacing the proxies with a stand-in until the error message goes away to help identify the culprit.
As some advice I would find what currently provokes the errors such as if there is a minimal number of frames, certain frame etc so you can work from there.
One last thing you can try merging everything into a new blank scene to help rule out rouge 3dsmax models, settings and general errors that sometime creep into scenes.

I use V-ray to render a mixture of animations and I find it for the most part to be stable using the Brute Force and light cache. When time is short I have completed projects using brute force, progressive rendering and the denoiser.

[TSOLAKISARCHITECTS]

Hey Anthony thanks for the reply! Its true that its hard without seeing my scene. I managed by trial and error to isolate the problem. It seems that its being cause by 4 animated trees that i have made. I have used some online tutorials to give animation to trees by using noise modifiers on their leaves and trunk, then scatter those trees via forest pack. Probably something there is giving me a mess i have to look into it more deeply to understand what it is. Any suggestions are more than welcome!

[vladimir_krastev]

Hi it could be the Forest Pack. Have you tried without it? If you can please send the simplified scene (that still has the issue) to https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/requests/new so we can have a look.

[TSOLAKISARCHITECTS]

Hi Vladimir, thanks for your reply!! I tried without the trees in general and it was super. Now i will try with the forest pack, so that i can pinpoint where the problem is! If it still gives me trouble i will send the scene so you can take a look at it! Thanks a lot for your help!

[fixeighted]

What you could try is to point cache the noise animation on each tree and that might help.

[TSOLAKISARCHITECTS]

fixeighted, thanks for the reply! Yes i will try that as well. Do you know if point cache also works if i make the tree a vray proxie and i copy the point cache modifier on top of the proxie? (without exporting the animation in the proxie)

[fixeighted]

I just tested a simple scene with one similarly animated tree, point cached, in a Forest of 2.5k trees, static camera and a untextured dome.
It's clear that it's a ram issue somewhere along the line, with usage incrementing for each frame at a large rate, e.g. from 8gb to 18gb over 11 frames out of 100,
indicating that I'd run out before finishing.

[TSOLAKISARCHITECTS]

Wow ok, that is great feedback. I will run this by the itoo forum as well, maybe over there they have a better understanding cause from what it seems its the forest pack element that blows it off

[fixeighted]

An old post but similar issue https://forum.itoosoft.com/forest-pro-(*)/memory-leak/

[TSOLAKISARCHITECTS]

Thanks fixeighted for the search trully its the same problem!

Turns out it was a forest pack issue, i took it over to the iToo forum and they saw it and found out its an issue with the cache. I am posting the link here for convenience

https://forum.itoosoft.com/forest-pr...g-forest-pack/

[fixeighted]

Aha! Good stuff...Itoo peeps are usually pretty rapid at sorting stuff out, so fingers crossed