2018 VRay Spawner Freezes Machine....

[joelly3d]

I recently migrated to Max 2018 and VRay 3.60.03 and my main render machine is freezing entirely when I launch VR Spawner and send something to it. I've checked the firewall, reinstalled both Max and VRay from scratch and it still does it. I can open max and render on that machine remotely just fine. But if I launch spawner and try to send a render to it from my workstation, it locks that machine up entirely. I have to hard power off. Anyone ever heard of anything like this?

This is a new one and I have no idea how to remedy it. Any ideas? Any help appreciated, otherwise I have to roll back to 2017 everywhere which was working fine. Ugh.

[joelly3d]

UPDATE: Been testing locally on that machine. With a more complicated scene (not just a ball) the machine is freezing. This didn't happen before at all with 2017, even while rendering for weeks on end. Looks like it got to "Building Embree" and froze. So I disabled that feature, and then it progressed to "Building Static Raycaster..." and then froze. So It isn't a spawner issue, it seems to be a render compile issue. Not sure what to do. I'll keep trying and updating here.

[joelly3d]

Tried rolling back NVidia Quadro graphics drivers, rolling back to vray v3.60.02 for 2018, Still froze on Embree after that. Then I shut off VRay Displacement and it rendered. Something about the displacement is freezing the machine. ... The Investigation continues.

[vlado]

Can you look at the memory usage? Is it possible that the scene overflows the available RAM?

Best regards,
Vlado

[joelly3d]

Yep looks like it is pinning at 100%. So here's the question then, why would it not have done this before? Same scene, Same RAM, Same PC. Seems odd to me.

[Zdravko.Keremidchiev]

I can't manage to reproduce this issue. Would it be possible to send us an example scene so we could investigate further.

[joelly3d]

I have 3 machines, all have 32GB RAM, seems like this one machine is crashing while the others are fine. All were fine with 2017, which is really odd. I am going to check a few more things. Is it possible windows changed the way memory is managed? I can't send this actual scene, but I'll see if I can reproduce with something simplified. I turned down the Dyn mem limit from 16000 to 8000 and it seems to be going. The memory still peaks at 100% but it falls back into the 90's after and it doesn't crash. Odd that the other machines don't seem to care either way. The only difference I see is that the disk drive on the machine that crashes is at a high usage while the other farm machine is not. I'll look into this.

[joelly3d]

This is kind of unreal... but the issue seems to have been the Intel RST service. Windows had updated to a driver that looked like it was more for windows 7 installed and i am on 10 x64 pro. I updated to right driver and now the whole system is faster. Just one random little thing auto-updates itself and can screw up two days of work...... apparently it just happened to coincide with restarts from installing max and vray updates. Welp, hopefully this will help someone else if they experience the same nonsense. Thanks for trying and advising guys!

[Zdravko.Keremidchiev]

Thanks for the update.