BACKBURNER - unexpected exception has occured...terminating

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Hello,
we have a really bad and annoying problem here.
its related to this SW - backburner/max2011/windows 7/vray 1.5 (the latest)

Either in the long rendering job or during animation, we get an error in BB which says that:

unexpected exception has occurred in network renderer and its terminating

the connections are fine, there is no interruption
the per job timeoout is set to 5000 minutes!!!

still doing
i am fine if this happened only with anims cos all other frames get rendered

but imagine this is happening when youre renderign a single image that lasts 24 HOURS and it happens randomly ...

any clues?

this has started happening since we have switched from max 2010/vista/vray 1.5SP4
to max 2011/win7/vray 1.5SP5

Please help!

Thank you very much

Best Regards

[QuakeMarine1]

the error message donst mean something special
its a default message if something goes wrong
most likely its out of memory
other posssible reason can be broken geometry

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

the machine has 12 GIGS of memory, the scene itself uses roughly 5 GIGs.....renders fine on one set of manager/server but it does this on the other set of machines.
so it cant be broken geometry and it cant be memory

[MegaPixel]

Try setting your "User Account Control" sensitivity on all of your Windows 7 Backburner nodes to their lowest setting. This was the solution for us when we switched to Windows 7 and encountered the same generic error message.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

it all leads to undervolted memory ...i am doing some tests now

[themaxxer]

I have similar problems with net rendering. our three workstations aren't render big scenes, but our renderslaves (Q6600) render fine. if I open the scene from the "job" folder of the manager my workstation crash (max)... I have read that the quadro cards have some problems to load scenes with big meshes. I hate this error, it make no sense at all. the other thing is if max crashes when loading a scene, then the scene won't open anymore before you haven't merged all the stuff into a new scene! the it works again, til the next crash. but I don't know why it doesn't render over net. any ideas?

best regards
themaxxer

[themaxxer]

it all leads to undervolted memory ...i am doing some tests now

what did you find out? is it a memory issue?

best regards
themaxxer

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

ive set ther memory voltage to 1.65 and rendergin overnight...i will know in about an hour when i get to office...will let you know!

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

hi themaxxer,
rendering went just fine overnight...so the conlusion in my case was unstable bios setting (voltage, CL timings)
check your memory and try removing viewcube and steering wheel from your standard max plugins (ive read this helps in some cases)
hope that helps
best regards

[themaxxer]

hm, nothing helped for me!!!
I don't get it that my old comps are rendering fine while our new workstations wont. I have now another comp from a friend and it's rendering too. all have win7 PRO 64bit, vray 1.5 SP5, 3ds max 2010 64bit, and all comps are loading the same plugins...
I have tested to increase the ram voltage and the tings with the viewcube.

maybe a new system (installation) may help?!

best regards
themaxxer

[pokoy]

If it's Win7 and all of those new machines don't render, try to start start server.exe on those machines with admin privileges and see if that helps. This happened to me too and I needed a while to find this out. Hope this helps.

[themaxxer]

I have found the source for the error... it's the VFB, but only if I want to save the image! when the "save separate render channel" check box isn't active, then the rendering starts without error.
I have tried everything to avoid this error, but I haven't found a solution or workaround. and it's still funny our old Q6600 render all the data without any error!

any ideas?

best regards
themaxxer

[FORCE_FACTORY]

I'm having the same problem--and it just popped up. Everything was going fine until the other day. The only thing that I changed that I can remember is updating my video card drivers. And this incarnation of the problem is really bizarre (well, at least, I've never seen it):
I have one workstation (dual 6-cores, Max 2011, vray 1.5 sp5, 12 gigs ram) that use to send my jobs to my render slaves (almost identical specs). Whenever I build a pre-calculated light solution (IR+Lcache) and send the job to the backburner queue, the render slaves pick it up just fine. When I close max and start up server on my workstation, I get the dreaded 'unexpected error' almost immediately when backburner starts loading the vray .dlls. No matter what, the workstation that I use to send the job doesn't render as a backburner server. But here's the kicker--when I open the same file up and render it locally on my workstation, no problem.
I have been using the VFB, so I'll try some tests using standard max buffer and see if that solves it, but I fear there's something bigger going wrong here.

[RE:FORM_STUDIOS]

I had the same problem and it appears to boil down to a problem in the MaxManaged.Cui file in your ENU folder.

This crashes max in backburner (with or without vray) :

[Graphite Modeling Tools]
Rank=1
SubRank=0
Hidden=1
FRect=232 321 1604 475
DRect=0 88 2214 129
DRectPref=2147483647 2147483647 -2147483648 -2147483648
DPanel=1
Tabbed=0
TabCt=0
CurTab=-1
CurPos=1 0 88 2214 129
CType=4
[Graphite Modeling Tools (Vertical)]
Rank=0
SubRank=0
Hidden=0
FRect=150 100 400 959
DRect=1779 127 1823 1394
DRectPref=2147483647 2147483647 -2147483648 -2147483648
DPanel=8
Tabbed=0
TabCt=0
CurTab=-1
CurPos=8 1779 127 1823 1394
CType=4

but this works :

[Graphite Modeling Tools]
Rank=1
SubRank=0
Hidden=0
FRect=232 321 1604 475
DRect=0 277 152 318
DRectPref=2147483647 2147483647 -2147483648 -2147483648
DPanel=1
Tabbed=0
TabCt=0
CurTab=-1
CurPos=1 0 277 152 318
CType=4
[Graphite Modeling Tools (Vertical)]
Rank=0
SubRank=0
Hidden=1
FRect=150 100 400 959
DRect=0 92 203 1098
DRectPref=2147483647 2147483647 -2147483648 -2147483648
DPanel=4
Tabbed=0
TabCt=0
CurTab=-1
CurPos=4 0 92 203 1098
CType=4

The only differences being the following entries :

[Graphite Modeling Tools]
Hidden=0
DRect=0 277 152 318
CurPos=1 0 277 152 318
[Graphite Modeling Tools (Vertical)]
Hidden=1
DRect=0 92 203 1098
DPanel=4
CurPos=4 0 92 203 1098

Way to go autodesk! Couple of hours wasted troubleshooting a problem with graphite modelling tools positioning that somehow causes backburner to become crashburner!