Light disappear during batch rendering

[wildcat]

I'm batch rendering a camera flythrough animation, and in some frames (radomly) all lights go out, and I can only see the ambient colors of maetrials.
I tried to bake animation paths, import references, parent another camera to the old one and render with it, nothing. When I render from maya window, the problem seem to disappear. But I can only batch render from a DOS window, because when I perform a batch rendering from the Maya window, it can't recognise the camera and renders with the default persp camera.
Please give me a help, or I'll have to find out manually and re-render every bad frame (among over 2000 frames)

Thanx

[goggle]

That sounds suspiciously like a problem that I encountered a while back. We think we've traced it down to a problem with MayaBatch on AMD Athlon processors, but there were also hints that it might have something to do with using BOT textures.

Are you rendering on Athlon's? or using BOT textures?
The only solutions we found were to stop doing those two things.

-James

[roboneill-o-neill]

In addition to the Athlon/BOT issue, there seems to be a memory leak in using BOT files that causes lights to turn off. It might be a similar, more general, memory leak that you're encountering depending on your system and scene complexity.

The best suggestion I've heard to work around it is to write a simple .bat script that basically restarts the renderer after a certain number of frames:

render -fs 1 -fe 10 .....
render -fs 11 -fe 20....

Hope this helps and good luck!

Rob

[wildcat]

Maybe you're right about rendering by small blocks of frames, as I get problems after frame 20 or so. I'm just trying it... but there's another problem: I get VERY ugly "stains" on the surfaces, as if they were dirty... looks like a shadow map problem. I'm reusing shadow maps, as no object in the scene moves except the camera. What do you mean with BOT Textures? I'm rendering anyway on Pentium 4 (I tried on 2 different machines) and I'm not using textures at all. I also thought it was because of the shadow map files sharing (the machines render together from a shared directory) but it didn't also work when I split the project and let the machines render each on its local disk.
Thanks anyway for the tips.
gm