I have a scene with 3 characters, a set, and some lights. They are broken into one layer for each.
I have diagnosed my problem to be either with the third character, or with it's layer. If I hide that character everything renders smoothly, but if the geometry is visible to the render, Mental Ray locks up and Xsi freezes.
Any ideas on how to fix it, or why a character would cause mental ray to freeze up?
I don't know, but I'm getting really fed up with XSI's rendering crashing. I have more than enough ram for this scene I'm rendering according to the taskmanager but still it doesn't fail to wake up in the morning and have that "failed to save scene" dialog after only rendering 5 or so frames
this scene is NOT super heave and I'm rendering it out in pieces for compositing yet even just these small chunks of goemetry manage to crash the render. I'm not even using any sort of crazy texture maps - just basic 1024x1024 and only like 5-9 or so texture maps per rendering layer
AGH!
Maya still has never messed up on rendering, just every once in a while using the smege batch rendering que will a scene halt rendering 2/3 thru. Still better than 5-6 frames
I have gone back to NT4 sp5 and don't have nearly as many render crashes, I suspect it is as much a problem with W2K as XSI but this has to be fixed very soon or I am jumping ship because it makes the package too unstable to use in production and therefore unaffordable to use for any of the other fantastic features
Nick
yeah I'm using NT4 sp6 but I also dual boot with w2k sp2 and XSI is a TOTAL joke on w2k. I launch it up and leave the room, then come back and it's already crashed - no scene, just launched the program like 5 min ago
i've tried numerous graphic drivers (have geforce 2 gts) I haven't tried it with the quadro mod cause the mod totally screws up halflife and unreal tournament - doesn't hold my settings etc.
I've been happy with maya's stability for the most part at least in comparison to xsi
Xsi is stabile for me on win2K
Try to check your power management settings : no pc shut down or standby during a render
In w2k I never even get to the rendering stage cause it keeps crashing constantly, yet on the same hardware booting into NT it runs just fine.
my computers don't go into standyby. Just the monitor goes off after 45 min
Can you give details of your system (drivers, Hardware) has xsi always worked for you, because it seems some people have no trouble and others are having heaps, we need to work this out!
Thanks, Nick
I should note that I have an abit kt7-RAID (dual RAID IBM drives) thunderbird 900 with an asus 7700 and XSI does crash quite a bit though somewhat workable - motion blur KILLS stability. 768megs generic ram
Yet over in my closet I have a regular kt7, no raid with a geforce 2 mx with perfect stability running NT. with a duron 800 512 megs generic ram
I'm not sure how the RAID or the asus card would cause instabilities - could be the video driver maybe? I have had problems with maya 3 sometime on my RAID system,
though at work maya of course runs flawlessly on a Dell dual 1ghz xeon, wildcat 4210, 1 gig rdram, scsi RAID
so there's my experience and my setup. Still doesn't explain XSI's horrible stability on w2k vs NT on the same computer
Interesting!, I Have tried Asus & abit motherboards, the one thing we seem to have in common is the Asus 7700 video card which to my knowledge is just a geforce 2 gts, used heaps of drivers and has always worked ok, Is it possible for a video card to cause render crashes? I don't know, but that seems to be something we have in common as well, I use t-bird 900 abit m/board 650mb of ram with ultra IDE drives and a 2 gig pagefile set.
Hopefully we can get to the bottom of this serious problem!
Cheers, Nick
My system:
- abit bp6 with 2 celerons 466
- Xsi installed on an IDE drive (but I know it's better on SCSI)
- Hercules 3d Prophet 2 , GeForce 2 gts, with Detonators 6.5
- Win 2k Sp1
I had some crashes with rendering, but it does not happen often. What happens :
I'm rendering a scene under Xsi and at the same time I have other apps running, like Outlook 2k or OE5.5. I often press ALT+TAB to see my rendering progress. Sometimes the render view window inside Xsi seems to have troubles to update itself and then Xsi crashes.
But I repeat that it does NOT happen often, perhaps once or twice a week. It might be a graphic card driver problem.
Hope this helps,
David
You may want to update to Win2K SP2. It seems to speed things up slightly and provide more stability.
Anyway, lack of memory is usually a cause for render crashes and for those of you reporting Win2K being a problem and NT not, well, Win2K consumes more than twice the memory of NT. If you have less than 512MB of RAM, then you're pressing your luck. Until recently, I only had 256MB RAM and often had to page to disk, but even then I never encountered the crashing as reported here.
Mental ray v2.x and earlier builds the entire scene in memory before the first ray is cast. If you have computationally expensive effects active (motion blur, displacement, depth of field, etc.), your memory consumption will zoom through the roof. It's in these situations that mental ray usually crashes and takes XSI with it. Also, by default, textures are written into the scene rather than drafted off the harddrive. If you're using very large textures (eg 1024x1024), then you should change the texture properties to be used off disk and not streamed in memory. This will free up lots of room for the rest of the scene as each uncompressed 1024x1024 texture map is roughly 5 MB. Is there any reason why you need 1024K resolution for textures if you rendering to NTSC or PAL where the final output is 1/4th the size or your textures???
The good news is that mental ray v3.0 that ships with upcoming XSI v2.0 uses lazy loading and requires significantly less memory build up as objects are tessellated as they're encountered rather than prior to the first ray. This reduces memory requirements and accelerates rendering in general. Scenes that have difficulty getting off the ground in v2.x will render very fairly cleanly in v3.0.
Matt
Matt Lind
Animator / Technical Director
Softimage certified instructor:
Softimage|3D
Softimage|XSI
speye_21@hotmail.com
I'm using sp2 on my w2k installs
I'm using 1024 textures for this scene cause there's some close up shots. I have a 1.4gig virtual memory partition. I did order more ram to bring my 768--> 1gig and 512-->768, we'll see if that helps any
For the textures - consider using mip mapping. It'll save you memory and XSI can build the mips. If you're textures are light on details, then you don't need to go that hi-res. 512x512 should be enough with proper lighting and good use of anti-aliasing techniques. You may also want to consider breaking up your textures so only the detailed areas are the high res while everything else is lower res. It'll make a big difference.
As for the Virtual RAM, be sure to define it on the same drive partition XSI is installed as that's where XSI will look for the swap space. 1.4 GIG is rather excessive for virtual swap - you don't need that much. Try setting your min/max swap file sizes the same to prevent fragmentation of the virtual swap space. Fragmentation can lead to confusion within the renderer and possibly cause a crash.
I am using mip mapping
Why does XSI need the swap file on the same partition that XSI is on? That's the most bizzare thing I've heard. Are the XSI programmers high? why can't their program use the virtual memory settings that are set for the OS like every other program? That'd just make the VM get fragmented having the swap file and programs on the same partition. I keep a 1.4 gig partition just for swap and it's completely filled so it never gets fragmented and the OS doesn't have to dig thru a bunch of crap on the partition to locate the swap file cause it's the only thing on the partition. Should I set my computers up differently?
Yes that does sound strange, I find xsi to be the most unstable 3d app I have ever used, last night I had a scene with simple polygon cubes representing stylised buildings, when I bevelled the edges on any of the cubes (and froze the operator stack) and then tried to duplicate any of them, instant crash!, but I could do this no problem in another fresh scene, I then deleted the offending cubes and rebuilt them, same happened again, merged the scene with a new scene, still no good!!!
this program has so much potential but I cant stick with it for much longer as my deadlines are being constantly moved back, I know xsi is still young but the price does not reflect that so I feel it could be made more stable, as far as hardware goes, a 3d app should be hardware independent (to a point) I know this is hard and developers are obviously working to fix these problems but I am fighting in the trenches and if my "gun" jams too many more times I might have to change sides!
Sorry to ramble on but I feel better now!
Cheers, Nick
Speye - just curious - you said that no crashes happened to you. Could you please be more specific on your hardware? Is it a brand name workstation or something else - model, chipset, graphics and stuff? IMHO we do have to exchange info on that stuff as it is truly bizarre that one can't use XSI at alll and othaers are really happy with it.
Cheers!!!!