#Render Lockup
Help!
I am in the middle of the largest project I have ever attempted, and 3DS
keeps locking up after about 2 to 3 rendered frames!
Using Zeos Pantera 90, with 24 Mbyte of RAM, Par (latest version), par
drive 1 Gbyte, and a SCCSI 1 Gbyte. The file is an 900 frame
animation….290,000 faces, Phong shading, 300 some objects.
What appears to be happening, is that when I swap to disk, and the swap
size approaches approx 70 Mbyte….the rendering process will hang. When I use
phong shading it happens within 2 to 3 frames, when I use flat, I can get
anywhere from 9 to 16 frames before the magic number. I cannot confirm tho on
all lockups that it happened when the swap hit 70 Mbyte.
I did have local shading variables for the two lights I was using….Map
size 1000, Map bias 1, and Map sample range at 5. I changed these to GLOBAL and
used the defaults of 500, 1 and 2 respectively, it still hung at about 70 Mbyte
swap size.
What is curious is the nature of the "Hang". sometimes it was a complete
freeze and forced reboot, sometimes I could hit the ESC key and it would exit
out normally. ( I would wait as long as 30 min before hitting ESC key when the
render bar ceased to move….it was not thinking and I jumped the gun). Not to
be misleading, it would not always hang during the render progress bar
sequence….sometimes it would hang during "optimizing".
This is a 900 frame animation @ 30 fps for a 30 sec spot…. I need help,
the customer is waiting!!!! Im at my wits end!!!!!
Yes I have tried the proverbial "Clean Boot", no luck….tonight for do do
and giggles I am going to set the -swapdisk parameter in the cfig386.exe file
to something other than the root….other than that, I am using cfig386
defaults.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated <G>
P.S. I have 500 Mbyte of free disk space on my swapdrive, and I have run
defrag, and optimize. Scan disk reported no problems….
Mason