VRayVelocity causing Unexpected Exceptions through Backburner

[rcollett]

So I am working on a very large scene with multiple animated cameras totaling over 5K frames. It uses about 12GB of RAM to render, but with both my draft settings (single pass) and my final settings (two pass with animation mode IR) every one of my servers renders it without error. If I add the VRayVelocity channel, then random servers error on random frames. Subsequent attempts to render those frames by other servers sometimes succeed, and sometimes fail. A few frames never complete despite dozens of attemts. The errors occur on every generation of machine in the farm. I have a variety of servers of different age, some as slow as dual core 2ghz with 4gb RAM, others with 6 and 8 cores above 3ghz with 16gb RAM. Some of the servers are Vista x64, others are Win7 x64. All are running the same deploy of Max2011 x64 and VRay 1.5 SP5. I need to upgrade to SP6, but unless someone knows that this issue is fixed, I'd rather not upgrade with the project deadline in one week. I might try running a dedicated render pass just to write out the velocity channel, but I shouldn't have to do that.

The error message in backburner is the ever so helpful "An unexpected exception has occured in the network renderer and it is terminating."

Here's some snippets of the vraylog on two different machines:

This one died during the Iradiance pass (8 core, 12gb RAM)

[2011/Aug/19|21:37:38]       Merging light cache passes.
[2011/Aug/19|21:37:48]       Light cache contains 107503 samples.
[2011/Aug/19|21:37:48]       Light cache samples collected; compiling lookup tree.
[2011/Aug/19|21:37:48]       Prefiltering light cache.
[2011/Aug/19|21:37:48]       1 interpolation maps registered
[2011/Aug/19|21:37:48]       Rendering interpolation maps with minRate=-3 and maxRate=-1
[2011/Aug/19|21:37:48]       Setting up 8 thread(s)
[2011/Aug/19|21:38:08]       Threads completed
[2011/Aug/19|21:38:08]       Setting up 8 thread(s)
[2011/Aug/19|21:38:57]         error: UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: Irradiance map thread
Last marker is at .\src\globillummap.cpp, line 1616: GlobalIllumMap::buildLightMap() {5}

This one died during the final render phase (2 core, 8gb RAM)

[2011/Aug/19|10:22:32]       Merging light cache passes.
[2011/Aug/19|10:22:40]       Light cache contains 63350 samples.
[2011/Aug/19|10:22:40]       Light cache samples collected; compiling lookup tree.
[2011/Aug/19|10:22:40]       Prefiltering light cache.
[2011/Aug/19|10:22:40]       1 interpolation maps registered
[2011/Aug/19|10:22:40]       Rendering interpolation maps with minRate=-3 and maxRate=-1
[2011/Aug/19|10:22:40]       Setting up 2 thread(s)
[2011/Aug/19|10:23:54]       Threads completed
[2011/Aug/19|10:23:54]       Setting up 2 thread(s)
[2011/Aug/19|10:26:50]       Threads completed
[2011/Aug/19|10:26:50]       Setting up 2 thread(s)
[2011/Aug/19|10:34:54]       Threads completed
[2011/Aug/19|10:34:54]       Calling endPass() on irradiance maps
[2011/Aug/19|10:34:54]       Calling prePassDone() on irradiance maps
[2011/Aug/19|10:34:55]       Image prepass completed.
[2011/Aug/19|10:34:55]       Rendering image.
[2011/Aug/19|10:34:55]       Setting up 2 thread(s)
[2011/Aug/19|10:35:51]         error: UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: Rendering region (384,192)-(448,256)
Last marker is at .\src\globillummap.cpp, line 1616: GlobalIllumMap::buildLightMap() {5}

Anyone have any ideas?

[vlado]

Do you have any skin modifiers in your scene? There was a particular issue with these that is handled somewhat better in SP6, but it might sill be better to point-cache these modifiers.

Best regards,
Vlado

[rcollett]

No, I don't think there are any skin modifiers. It's a city scene with a lot of buildings imported from Sketchup and curb details built from CAD shapes. There are animated cars created by CityTraffic (rendering.ru), but I think those are baked to keyframes. We are working on an Anima based crowd system, but that's not in the render yet. I am not sure how many other plugins it's using, but I think that Bercon Maps, Itoo Forest 3 and Blur are used. I've tried submitting the render with the standard frame buffer, as well as the VRay FB and it didn't seem to make any difference. Any other ideas? I might be able to send the scene to you, but it's very large and pointing to lots of asset files. I can send you the full logs if that might help.

Ray

[vlado]

If you can get me the V-Ray log file, it will still be useful to see what objects are in the scene; usually this happens because something is animated, and evaluation of one scene object from the scene causes another object to be updated without V-Ray knowing about it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[rcollett]

Vlado, Just wondering if you got the logs I sent. Had not heard anything back yet.

Thanks

[mcnamex]

had similar issue, turned out some geometries were corrupted when being rebuilt from revit

[vlado]

Vlado, Just wondering if you got the logs I sent. Had not heard anything back yet.

Yes, I got the logs; just one more question - does it render correctly without the animated objects? I guess we will really need the scene to figure out what goes wrong.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

try applying turn to poly modifier to the geometry in your scene and see if that works.