Vray5 / PhoenixFD not using all cores while rendering

[waaazoo]

Hi, Again, even at 4000pix wide I had one of the cameras crashing at Embree stage.

Thanks Paul. For sure, I can reduce the infinite sea mesh quality.... it's possibly a solution to get it render.... but is it right ? I have a monster computer and cannot use the "features" of the software. Pretty annoying, no ?
For now, I always had mid power computers, so I was pretty comfortable with trying to find tweaks. I had not enough memory, it was not fast enough... ok, let's deal with it and find tweaks. But now, even with a Very high end computer(s), you still have to find tweaks to get around problems... is that right ?
Again... it's not bashing... it's only hugely disappointing.

[waaazoo]

georgi.zhekov Is there a memory limit somewhere for Embree ?

[georgi.zhekov]

The memory limit setting is global and it is under the Settings tab in the V-Ray Settings > System rollout

It should be set to 0 by default so the memory won't be limited.

Can't seem to break the scene you have sent though. What I did is:

Open the scene and set the render resolution to be 5000px wide.

Set both Particle shaders to Point mode and disable the Volume light cache.

Open the VFB and disable the Test resolution button (it is set to 25% in the scene).

Render - the scene takes around 92GB of RAM.

I'm using V-Ray 5 for Maya, update 1.1 and Phoenix 4.41

Is there anything I'm missing? Does it error out if you hide the boat?

[waaazoo]

Hi Georgi,

Thanks a lot. I will try again with the scene without boat end let you know. I will check also about the memory limit setting if there is anything wrong.

[Paul Oblomov]

Heh. Get used to it, it's a beta tester's everyday life. For example I have maya crashing, when I set parented light to targeted...

[waaazoo]

The memory limit setting is global and it is under the Settings tab in the V-Ray Settings > System rollout

It should be set to 0 by default so the memory won't be limited.

Can't seem to break the scene you have sent though. What I did is:

Open the scene and set the render resolution to be 5000px wide.

Set both Particle shaders to Point mode and disable the Volume light cache.

Open the VFB and disable the Test resolution button (it is set to 25% in the scene).

Render - the scene takes around 92GB of RAM.

I'm using V-Ray 5 for Maya, update 1.1 and Phoenix 4.41

Is there anything I'm missing? Does it error out if you hide the boat?

Hi,

After the last posts I couldn't get the crash with Embree raycaster happen again (on the previous scene).
Now, suddenly, I'm experiencing it again on another project !
I did a few tests:

Launch from maya batch command line, at 3500 pix wide -> crash at Embree static ray caster -> I had 2 subdivisions on ocean mesh (I didn't look at RAM usage)
Launch with Vray standalone command line, at 3500 pix wide -> crash at Embree static ray caster - > same scene as above (Max (peak) RAM usage 60Gb. I have 256Gb on my system)
Launch with maya batch command line at 3500pix wide, but reduced ocean subdivisions to 1 -> Render works ! (RAM usage 44Gb)

Could it be that building Embree ray caster crashes around 60Gb even if system has more RAM?

cheers,

Olivier

[georgi.zhekov]

Hey,

Can't say much without the logs. Can you send over the Phoenix log and a crash dump if possible?

The usual location of the crash dump files is:

Windows: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp

Linux: /tmp/

The Phoenix log is created in:

Windows: C:\ChaosPhoenix

Linux: /home/$USERNAME/

Can you send over these and the scene file with a cache file so that we can try and reproduce it here?

Thanks!

[waaazoo]

Hey,

Can't say much without the logs. Can you send over the Phoenix log and a crash dump if possible?

The usual location of the crash dump files is:

Windows: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp

Linux: /tmp/

The Phoenix log is created in:

Windows: C:\ChaosPhoenix

Linux: /home/$USERNAME/

Can you send over these and the scene file with a cache file so that we can try and reproduce it here?

Thanks!

Georgi,

I sent a complete project with 3 scenes. Ticket number 4038.
Please look at the batch file in the project root to see the three tests I launched. Please also look into the "logs" folder.

Test1 - sea mesh subdivisions 2 - rendered at 5000 pix wide -> render was running but no sea (new bug actually)
Test2 - sea mesh subdivisions 2 - rendered at 3500 pix wide -> render crashes at Embree Ray caster creation
Test3 - sea mesh subdivisions 1 - rendered at 3500 pix wide -> render worked

I hope you will be able to reproduce the same crashes.

Best

[georgi.zhekov]

Thanks a lot. We'll let you know once we find out what is going on.

[georgi.zhekov]

Just wanted to let you know that we fixed a crash with your setup that was caused by an out of memory error. You can get a latest nightly and give it a go.

There are a few important things to note, though.

The scene you have sent us - we managed to render it at 3500 pix wide, but it used around 280GB of memory (256GB RAM and around 30GB swap on the HDD) and you need to disable Embree for it to render.
Disabling Embree can't be done from the UI, but you can do it with the following lines of post-translate script.

from vray.utils import *
emb = findByType("SettingsRaycaster")[0]
emb.set("embreeUse", 0)

As using 280GB of memory is far from ideal, I can recommend a different approach for such a shot.

If your scene will use the Pure ocean mode and won't require a proper sim, instead of using the Ocean mode to create the liquid surface you can go for the Cap mesh mode and make a very large simulator that covers what the camera sees.
You can make the simulator 1-2 voxels tall to save some memory. Phoenix will make a dense grid underneath for the pure ocean mode so it will eat up quite a lot of memory if the simulator is too tall.

As you have noticed - if you increase the resolution too much - the ocean will be missing. This is the expected behavior when there is not enough memory to build the ocean mesh.
If this thing happens - usually there should be a message in the Phoenix log, stating that there was not enough memory.

Thanks a lot for the scenes and the cooperation and I hope my suggestions will help.

[waaazoo]

Thank you for this feedback, even if it doesn't really sound as a solution. We are speaking here about a 3500pix wide rendering, but, in fact, we would need to render way bigger sometimes.
I will take it a go anyway, and see how it behaves here. I hope that a proper solution will be found in future updates of the plug-in.