anyone having problems with maya/vray batch rendering?

[mr furious]

we're having some weird memory issues and i'm starting to think maya batch/vray rendering my be part of the issue. Anyone doing farm rendering with batch/vray?

we're running out of Virtual Memory on 16 gb machines (30+ gigs) on scenes that locally take only a few gigs.

anyone else?

thanks

Andy

[gardeler]

I'm doing some farm rendering, but I haven't noticed that kind of behavior on our scenes. Anything specific about your scene that could cause it? Like huge textures, super high res models or so? I'll try to check my next farm render to see if something is happening over here..

[mr furious]

it varies, we're in the process of trouble shooting but i just wanted to see how smoothly maya batch/vray rendering on other farms

Andy

[djx]

No problems here. Big scenes rendering well.

[leow]

we run into a issue with the VRayLight material, where vray would allocate huge chunks of memory(~24 gb) at random.
I think it is fixed since sp1.
Otherwise it behaves really smooth in the renderfarm.

/Leo

[filto]

Batch rendering here is just very inconsistent. It works sometimes and fails sometimes. All in all Vray behaves extremely inconsistent from my experiences. When it works it is great, but mostly you are fighting more tech problems than doing actual work which is quite tiresome

[pechart]

Here everything runs smooth. Okay, we've got no big farm, just 8 machines. But no problems most of the time. We're rendering with mayabatch. What do you mean by "fails sometimes"?

[djx]

@filto
My experience is totally different to yours. Rendering is very consistent. Small farm, 20 machines. In the last year I have not had a single failure that was not caused by user error. Even the nightly builds are stable.

[mr furious]

we're running anywhere from 80-400 nodes and pushing a lot of data. in talking to vlado we've seem to have found a memory leak that is more about maya 2010 than anything. getting massive ram spikes... and then sometimes rendering ok.

thanks for the feedback, btw we've completely switched to a standalone pipeline and things are a lot smoother...but still getting some memory failures...but not nearly as much as before. Vlado is looking into things...

Andy

[filto]

It is quite possible my problems are usererrors, usually problems are. They could be mayaproblems and not vray aswell. But the fact is I do get many occurences when pressing batch rendering and it results in vray saying it is finished but haven't actually rendered a single frame and later on with what to me is the exact same setup it works fine. Vray giving a fail notice and refusing to render all of a sudden just because I assigned a mesh a new material or something. Vray standing still on 99 percent of rendering for 5 minutes or more locking up the system. I'm quite new to Maya but have used Vray for Max for many years before that and never encountered this much problems. My collegues are oldtime mayausers but new to Vray so they don't get what is going on either. I guess I just miss the good old times in Max when everything worked smoothly and there weren't billions of buttons and checkboxes everywhere that each one of their own could bring the whole thing down. Sorry for the rambling I just needed to get it out of my system Employing a techguy so I can concentrate on doing actual work instead of spending 90 precent of my day chasing bugs might the best solution

[vlado]

Which build of V-Ray for Maya are you using? Which OS? It is quite possible that many of these issues have been fixed already.

Best regards,
Vlado

[aweidenhammer]

We are having a great many problems on our farm. Many frames that should take 10 min or less hang at an hour or 2, or never finish. It's getting nuts. We are on 2010. The thought that there are memory leaks is a possible culprit, though jumping into a farm machine doesn't reveal a memory problem.

We are using Deadline, but the problems are also happening on Rush at RenderRocket. Could be some form of user error but not sure what it could be... we've tried a lot of things.

[vlado]

Which V-Ray build is this? Have you tried a different Maya version, or rendering through the V-Ray Standalone?

In Andy's case, when V-Ray asked Maya 2010 for the number of triangles of a particular geometric object, Maya created an inordinate amount of CPU threads (several hundred) - apparently in an attempt to utilize multithreading for some calculation - which eventually exhaust the available Windows resources. This didn't seem to happen with other versions of Maya that I tried.

Newer builds of V-Ray try to minimize the calls to the defective Maya API method, so the chances that the scene renders are greater. However sometimes the error happened when the scene itself is loaded by Maya, before any V-Ray code was executed - can't do much about that.

I'm not sure if this is your problem though. If you can get me a scene that I can test here, I will be able to tell you more.

Best regards,
Vlado

[aweidenhammer]

Allright. I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that it was vray's fault. From what we can tell, our problems were a mix of several frustrating factors:

1. particle caching bugs. I won't get into it... but basically, if one particle in a scene is not cached (no matter how simple) the caches for the others don't speed up rendering. (beware the referenced particle system
2. San problems. Our storage solution was having write problems... slowing down our writes to insane levels
3. deadline submission script errors when rendering with vray framebuffer active.

as you can see, our pipeline is not mastered But it will be.

Andrew

[Aneurisma]

I've got problems with Batch rendering too. I'm running OSX 10.6.6, Maya 2011 Subscription Advantage Pack and the current vray build (not the nightly). Every time I tried to do a batch render it crashed. It seems to load fine but ultimately it crashes...
Could this also be a memory leak?