last bucket taking forever?

[timmatron]

And it's not just with buckets. Even when you cancel a light cache it still takes just as long to unfreeze. I haven't been working with RC3 for that long but it seems like some scenes do it and others don't. But once it starts it will keep on doing the same thing.

[Sawyer]

I farmed a job out to Respower and all of the images froze on the last 3 "frames"/cpu's. I canceled and restarted the images many times finally 1 of the 5 original images finished.

The Respower people said:
"This is normally exceedingly rare, although you are using a beta version of V-Ray, so it is conceivable that something is triggering a bug there."

I am using 1.5 rc3.

[percydaman]

ya I just dont recall having these issues until moving to 1.5, possible rc3. But then I also switched to 1.5 about the same time as switching to max 9, so hopefully its not just coincidental.

[harperperkins]

Just PMed you Vlado....

FYI - I'm having this problem as well...even when taking the bucket size down to 8x8. Not all files do this and each time I render the hanging bucket occurs in another location.

This resolved for RC4 or above?

TIA,
ME

[timmatron]

It's really driving me crazy. Even if I cancel a low res. light cache pass, it still takes about 30 seconds to unfreeze. It makes test rendering very painful.

[Geertvdp]

Any update on this problem?

I'v noticed this problem before but with my current scenery (1.6mil polygons and a lot of objects) it is particulary irritating, taking up to 4 mins to for the last bucket to finnish up...

Having the buckets reduced does have a positive effect on the rendertime but the problem still persists...

[jacksc02]

geertvdp, it sounds like max is just trying to unload the geometry from ram which can take a while especially if max has started to use virtual memory

[jsr]

Noticed that I don't have this problem any more in R4

[timmatron]

Noticed that I don't have this problem any more in R4

Hmm, when do we get that one?

[rcollett]

I've just upgraded to SP3a, and now I'm having this problem with Backburner jobs. My current scene uses two render passes, the Animation Pre Pass and the Animation Render pass. On about 10% of my machines (I have a 50+ computer farm), the render will get down to the very last bucket and then will just sit there for hours with no CPU usage! Both the Pre Pass and the Render pass has this issue. If I kill the Backburner server and then restart it, another computer will pick up that frame and finish it fine. The computer that was stuck will then get assigned a different frame and it will complete it just fine.

Max 2009, VRay SP3a, Backburner 2008.1

[vlado]

I really need a scene where I can reproduce this; also some more information about the machines you are using (# of cores) will also be useful.

Best regards,
Vlado

[rcollett]

I found the problem. The frame range was originally set to -300 to 900. The renders for frames -300 to -1 were all messed up (bad IRAD flicker, lots of objects not illuminated correctly, etc), so we renamed the IRAD frames to fit a 0 to 1200 time range, went through every scene and moved all animation keys +300, re-rendered the first 300 IRAD frames, then re-rendered all of the final frames 0-1200. The final re-render worked well on the first 300 frames where we had fresh IRAD data, but when it hit the IRAD frames that had been renamed, machines started hanging on the last bucket.

We tried to save some time by not re-rendering all of the IRAD frames, and it came back and bit us in the butt. If you still want more info about what my setup is, or my scene let me know. Doing it the "right way" did not have the last bucket problem. I can't remember the last time we tried to render negative frames, but from this experience we will avoid it in the future.

-Ray

[Tim in Hollywood]

I really need a scene where I can reproduce this; also some more information about the machines you are using (# of cores) will also be useful.

Best regards,
Vlado

I will happily send you a super-simple scene that causes this problem here. To test the system on our new dual quad-core, I created a scene with a few random objects. Didn't apply any materials, just default colors. Added a VRay plane light. Probably less than 400 polys.

I get the last-bucket hang. I think the scene should render in less than 5 seconds (without this problem). It is a truly tiny scene.

Windows XP Pro x64
2x Xeon E5504 2.0GHz (Nehalem, dual quad-core)
12GB RAM
3ds max 2009
VRay 1.5 SP3a


I also have a somewhat larger scene (only 6,000 polys, though) that demonstrates slowness problems. Nothing special about the scene at all. No grass or displacement, just basic lighting and texture maps. If memory serves, it uses only 2.2MB of RAM. *** It uses only one core on the prepass stages.***

I saw some other threads that mentioned a couple possible fixes. They were:

renderers.current.system_numThreads=0 (it was 0)
I also changed the number of Light Cache passes to 16 (was
No difference.

Where do I send the tiny test file that produces the last-bucket hang?

Thanks!

[vlado]

You can send the scene to me at vlado@chaosgroup.com; we do have a dual quad-core machine here, but so far I have not noticed any issues with it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[cecofuli]

Same problem here.
I don't have time to make some in depth test, but sometimes, last buckets, very simple shader, simple model, take very long time to render.
See this. It's just a simple car-paint shader. But the same happen with all shader.
I render this scene in DR and the last bucket take too much time. 3 minutes is very high rendertime for this 32 size bucket with i7 970 # 4.2 Ghz with 24 GB RAM with LWF + Universal setting noise thres= 0.01.
I see also in some other scenes the same behavior. I remember a scene that the last bucket take 20 minutes! I don't remember if that happen only in DR mode or also in local mode. Sorry.
I want just report that.

Bye