unpredictable rendering time

[hmpf]

Hi everyone.

we have been using VRay for quite a while now at my workplace and we fell quite comfortable with it. Just now, we're closing in on a deadline and there's one problem that's causing major headaches:

Since we have switched to 64 (XP64, 3dsmax 9 64) including an update to VRay 1.5RC3, we have some trouble rendering some of our animations.
Almost everything in a sequence works like a charm (sometimes MotionBlur, sometimes glossy materials, etc.), just a handful of frames won't render - to be more precise while any other frame might render at e.g. 1-2 minutes, for the aforementioned I lost my patience after - say - 45min.

I don't understand why the rendertimes would be that drastically different even though the animation ist only minimally different to the frames before or after...

And the long render times did not depend on the render workstation, even on a workstation, starting only that exact frame as single frame did not help.

Did anyone ever experience similar problems? or found a way around them?

Thanks in advance.

kai

[Stefan K.]

Maybe some objects with a animated visibility track start to get visible? --> brought me unexpected high rendertimes...

[hmpf]

i don't believe so...

sounds valid. unfortunately I do not think that's it, because these renegade frames in a lot of animations recently, sometimes in a smooth camera move around static objects.
I know our scenes are quite memory heavy (lots of machine pieces -> hi poly count), but scenes that were working in previous versions of the renderer have now these errors.

At first I thought it was a problem with the glossy materials and the antialiasing options but these frames won't even render with fixed rate antialiasing in some cases...

thanks for the fast answer though.

[Da_elf]

wasnt there an rc3 bug with x64?

[DaForce]

Are you using pre-calced IR maps?

I *think* sometimes when the vray hits a frame where there is not enough IR info it can slow right down for some reason. But that might be under different circumstances.

Is it always specific frames that are slow.. like always frame 342 can you try rendering just that one frame by itself?

The bug AFAIK was to do with slow material editor...

[hmpf]

unfortunately I would have to rule out IR-Maps as well, sine the frames in question don't use GI.

This has happened n several render jobs of ours. I can't say that there is a pattern in the frames across these jobs.

Althoug it's consistent, that once there is such a frame, this exact frame won't be rendered by any machine in the network - I couldn't even render them on my machine.

[hmpf]

render bug?

@Da_elf

thanks for the short input, sending my jobs as 32bit to the render farm seems to solve most of the problems.

I would only like to ask you where the information stems from. I did not not find a matching bug report. Maybe I did not search properly....
but if you could point me in the right direction...