Deadline error 'Preparing Ray Server'

[emartin8907]

Hi,

Using Vray 3.406 and latest deadline, windows 10

I am having problems with a scene where it crashes the computer trying to render local, and trying to render through Deadline I get this error. This only happens when I try rendering 4k or larger, 2k renders in a couple hours and anything below renders fine and quick. I need to render 8k..

Report Date/Time Report Type Slave Name Task ID Plugin Frames Title Task Time Average CPU Peak CPU CPU Utilisation Average Ram Peak Ram
2017/08/16 21:07:03
Error X-PC 0 MayaBatch 1 Error: V-Ray error: Exception [module=1] : Preparing ray server 00:00:25:55 27 % 77 % 26 % (23430996 / 86781472 clocks) 93.087 GB (37%) 172.760 GB (68%)

I have some 8k texture maps in my scene which I usually don't do, other than that my scene is pretty standard a couple gig car model which I even tried making into a proxy object and a bunch of textures.
Machine has 256 gb of ram and dual xeon cpus so it should be able to handle this..

Going to try exporting my scene out to a new scene and see what happens but am just curious what could have happened or what this 'Preparing ray server' error is about

[Svetlozar Draganov]

It may be a memory issue afterall, there are some stats stat show extreme memory usage but I'll have to confirm them with our Devs.
Is there lots of dynamic geometry in the scene like displacement, subdivs, hair/fur?
Make sure that all Displacement attributes use On-The-Fly geometry generation instead of Pre-Tesselated:


Can you try to update to the latest version and see is there is any improvement?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

[Mihail.Djurev]

Do you have displacement on the proxy?

[emartin8907]

Thank you for the replies

There is no displacement or hair or fur. I will try updating vray and then set geo generation to on-the-fly, and report back.
I will double check also for any possible displacement but there shouldn't be.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

On-The-fly is actually a Displacement option, if there is no displacement this is not applicable.
Can you try to disable Displacement and Subdivision globally from Overrides tab of render settings and see if that helps to render higher resolutions?

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Can you also explain or show what is in that scene?
If there's is no dynamic geometries there shouldn't have any differences in the export times of different resolitions.

[emartin8907]

hi res car and a large box for the ground with an ice texture/ lots of refraction. Actually I just realized the 'ice' has displacement on it- 8k map. I've been so focused on the car that was all i was thinking about here..

I actually just moved my car, ground, necessary cameras and lights, to a new maya scene, and same problem. renders 2k fine, 4k same error. :/

I am disabling the displacement now and trying again.

[emartin8907]

Houston we have liftoff!! global override disabling displacement did the trick.

But why can't I have 8k displacement :/ I feel like these machines should be able to handle this?

[Svetlozar Draganov]

They should be able of course but it may be necessary to tweak the settings a little bit.
Displacement can fill up the Ram very quickly on high resolution scenes, especially if its pre-tesselated.
What are the displacement settings of the ice object and is it the only object/material with displacement?

[emartin8907]

here are my displacement settings for the ice, and there are no other objects with displacement.
I see I am using Pre-tessellated, should I first try changing to on the fly?

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Yes, switch it to On-The-Fly and see if that would help.
What are the subdiv parameters for the displacement?