Intermittent RENDERING freezes!

[CipesDesign]

Hi NNA support team,In VWA w/ Landmark & Renderworks on a Mac G4 running OS 9.1: Occasionaly, and without seemingly being provoked, a Final Render will fail about half way down the screen. The only cure is to force quit VW and re-boot. Please submit this to the de-buggers.

Thanks! PLC

[Guest]

Do you get an error message or does it just freeze ?

Do you have any glass shaders and image based textures in this drawing?

If you switch to Custom RenderWorks and turn off the nurbs selection, does that render ?

[ 05-07-2002: Message edited by: Katie ]

[CipesDesign]

Katie,

1) There is no error message. The machine just locks up when the "rendering curtain" has dropped about halfway down the screen.

2) I have not added shaders. I am using only door & window PIO's and textures that were included in VWA & L w/ RW's.

3) I have not re-set the "custom renderworks" settings. Usually, by the time I force-quit and re-boot VW's, everything will work fine again for some time (maybe an hour, maybe the rest of the day).

4) FYI: the first time I noticed this was immediately after changing the ambiant light level in my linked layer.

Thanks! (And BTW, did you ever get a file from me and some questions last week???) PLC

[bclydeb]

I get a similar preoblem with a file I began under VW Architect 9.0 running on MacOS9.0.1. Last December I bought a G4 dual 800 which can switch hit betwixt MacOS 9.2 and X.x.x

The problems I have is that Renderworks 100% of the time freezes after rendering about 20% down the screen of this file on the dual 800. whether under VWA 9.0.1using the MacOS9.2 boot or Using VWA 9.5 OSX native using the MacOSX boot.

Same file on my old G3 -333mhz renders fine using VWA v9.0.1

I have also upgraded to VWA 9.5.1 and also installed VW landMark v95.1.

The rendering settings I have under the file on the G3 are 3d conversion on high, and custom renderworks set to use High detail, shadows ray traced, ray tracing recursion set to 2, transparency on, antialiasing on and nurbs on. Pict export is set to 72 dpi, printing to 300dpi.

The G3 has 750MB ram.

The dual 800 has 1.2GB of ram.

How come the "better" version of VWA on the "Better" machine can't render?

[bgore]

I'AM Running the same type of Machine A G-4 800 Dual Processor and I downloaded the New 9.5 update and I'am getting the same response but on a drawing that rendered fine before the down load

[Matthew Giampapa]

Ok, since this looks like it is common problem. Can you email the file that is crashing to tech@nemetschek.net. I would like to get to the bottom of this.

Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

[Davis Design]

I had the same problem when I had multiple light sources with shadows turned on- if I turn off the shadows on all but one light source I don't get freeze-ups.... maybe this is a clue to the problem (Mac G4,dual 1GHZ, 1G ram)

[CipesDesign]

Yes! When I modify any lighting element, the next render will freeze. If I go to TOP PLAN, then modify the element, then go back to another (usually perspective) view everything seems fine. PLC

[Kevin]

Did anyone find a fix for this? VW freezes after rendering about half of the screen.

VW9.5.3, OS10.2.3, 1Ghz Powerbook

[Guest]

Kevin,

How large is the file you are working with?

Are you using Spotlight or any custom textures that have an image based texture with transparence shader ?

[Guest]

Kevin,

What do you have set for the Max Number of Undo's in the VW Prefs?

[Kevin]

Hi Katie;

Max undo is set to 15.

[Guest]

Okay ..

Renderings are stored as part of that history.

If you can render a few times and then quits on you, it could be running out of memory.

Try this --

Restart the computer. Set the number of undos to 1 or 0.

Go thru and render the drawing a few times. (As many times as it would take to crash or stall on a normal basis.)

Does it still freeze after a certain number of renderings?

How many renderings can you get thru ?

[Kevin]

Hi Katie;

The file is 28MB created with VWA 9.5.3. Lighting is a single sun source and some ambient both set with the View>Lighting menus.

Textures are unaltered from the Renderworks library: glass, aggregate and chrome. The most demanding part of this rendering is that I have a wall of glass block. I created 3d glass block and gave it a glass texture. So there are hundreds of glass solids to render.

The behaviour is not consistent. If I force quit VW it will render a few times before freezing. This happens both on a static render and when rendering an orbit animation. Twice the animation froze at about frame 20 out of 151 frames.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

[Garry Dreger]

Me too. VW 9.5.1. Renderworks 9. Mac os 9.0.4. 384mb ram. Intermitent is the word! Once every 30 or so renderings, no light changes, it stops half way [ thereabouts]. I'm glad I'm not alone; however, I'd rather not have the misery of all one has to go thru with a freeze.

Regards

Garry Dreger

[Guest]

Okay, you never said the renderings were animation renderings.

That is a whole other beast.

Please be as specific and iwth as much information as possible when posting here as a simple word or two can mean an entirely different thing.

[Guest]

Garry,

Update to OS 9.2.2.

Also, how much built in memory do you have?

How much do you have allocated to VW?

[Kevin]

Hi Katie;

Actually my first post was about static rendering. About half of the screen would render and then freeze.

I went on to oribit point rendering, (animation), and it would render perhaps 120 out of 151 frames and then freeze.

After your advice about restarting with a lower undo preference, I decided to try a walk-through animation.

The computer has frozen on all three types of rendering.

I am sorry if I was not clear. Thank you for your help. I await your reply.

[Guest]

Can you email me a file or two so I can send them off to the engineer to look at?

tech@nemetschek.net

Subject: attn: Katie

[Guest]

Can you email me a file or two so I can send them off to the engineer to look at?

tech@nemetschek.net

Subject: attn: Katie

please include information about this post and/or a link to this page.

I get too many emails a day to keep track of everything upstairs!

thanks

[Kevin]

Katie;

How large of a file can you accept? I do not think it is possible to send a 28MB file.

Thanks.

[Guest]

I have an unlimited size allowance.

If you cannot email the file, email me and I can send you information on where to FTP the file to.

Try to compress the file too. That should reduce the file size a good bit.

[ 01-27-2003, 04:51 PM: Message edited by: Katie ]

[Kevin]

Hi Katie;

It froze again.

As you suggested I restarted the computer and set the number of undos to 1. The animation is 30 seconds at 24 frames per second. I ran about 6 tests in Open GL to get the animation the way i wanted it. During these tests the computer never froze. The Open GL animations took about 15 minutes each to render.

Then I restarted, set undos to 1, and set the animation to render in Custom Renderworks, Detail: Low, Ray Trace Shadows, Use Ray Tracing, Recursion Level: 1, Use Textures, Show Transparency, No Anti-Aliasing, No Nurbs.

I kept an eye on it and it seemed to do fine. Rendering was slow but was progressing. Last night when I left it, the screen read: Frame 220 of 721, Time spent: 5:49:11, Time remaining: 13:15:12.

This morning it reads the same and is now frozen. If I did not know better, I would swear that as soon as "it saw me leave the room", it froze. I have no explanation for why it froze as soon as I left it unattended.

I had the energy saver set to never sleep. The screen saver comes on, but it came on many times before the program froze.

What should I do now?

VW9.5.3, OS10.2.3, 1GHz TiBk, 512MB

[Garry Dreger]

384 mb built in.

264 mb allocated to VW

[Guest]

Garry,

What do you have set for the max number of undo's in VW?

If you close VW and start it up again after the rendering freezes, are you able to render once again?