Network Rendered Frames - Stalling

[Adam H. Stewart]

I am rendering large scale frames 1024 x 576, they are pretty intense Displacment, Glossy Reflections, GI. All that being said they are taking about 30 minutes to render - on average - BUT some frames refuse to render. The machines get as far as Prepass but never actually make it to rendering part. There is nothing special happening in these frames, and all machines are identical in the farm. There is also no pattern to the stalling, right now Render Node 102 is stalled, on a frame that is identical to one it rendered in 33 minutes only 2 hours ago. If I render locally it seems like the problem is lessoned but not cured. Does this sound familiar to anyone ?

[Morbid Angel]

yes it does. This happened to me on one scene where I hade multiple displaced surfaces with sss. Light cache would just hand up. But this happened on every frame. We went around it by decreasing vray displacement subdivisons, default 256 to 12 and edge lenght to 7...

[Adam H. Stewart]

So Strange

I have tried rebuilding the scene, rendering local, saving local, rendering on different machines. It renders fine at lower res, but once it gets near the bigger res, it stalls again. It is so random, I have gotten it down to 2 missing frames. I am so desperate I have just put the same two frames to render on 14 different machines - one on them has to stick, as it doesn't make any sense where the error is coming from, maybe the solution doesn't make any sense
Or maybe it is just I leave the country tomorrow morning and this damned thing has be finished by then. The time is counting down - I hate machines.

Thanks for your help.

[Adam H. Stewart]

It might just be the Displacment - 2D

I am doing tests with 3D Displacment and it seems to render much, much quicker. This could just be the key to the puzzle - I am having more anti-alias problems though, I will have to crank them up a bit.

[Morbid Angel]

which displacement did you use before?

[Adam H. Stewart]

That did the trick

That did the trick. I was using 2D displacement before, it is an object that I made in Zbrush and hunting around on the forums it seems as though 2D Displacement was the way to go (lots of people where claiming it was faster ?) I couldn't have been more wrong. If you hadn't of mentioned changing the Max Sub-division level I never would have tried it. My rendertimes dropped from 30-40 minutes (with no stalled frames) to 5 minutes a frame, with higher Anti-alias values too - insane!!!

http://h1.ripway.com/Adam_Stewart/RMES_107_0289.jpg

Included is an image of the Eagle in Question.


Thanks for your help

[DaForce]

Wow thats a HUGE decrease in rendertimes... well done

Eagle looks great!!

[Morbid Angel]

glad to hear that, as the matter of fact I never use 2d displacement.