#Render Lockup
2 messages in this thread
Mason: I'm in **my** biggest project and I get similar results, except that I
get an apparrantly bogus memory parity error on frame 2 or 3.
Usually, if I hide some of the more complex (but not currently visible) parts
of the model, it usually renders OK, but it will sometimes go 24 hours or more
before it flakes out. (My swap files gets to about 26-28 MB before it fails.)
This is only on my 32MB 486DX2-50 machine at work. Neither my 32MB 486DX2-66
at home or the 16MB P5-66 seem to do it, even on the same model.
One thing to be careful of – if your system crashes often you should run
CHKDSK after you bring it back up. I had my rendering time go from 18 min per
frame to 3 and a half hours per frame on my current model. It turned out that I
had 211MB of lost clusters on the swap disk! Every time it flamed out I would
lose the 30MB used by the swap file.
Chris
– Chris Johnston, Written 09-Mar-1995 @ 21:57:09
Using: Windows NavCIS PRO 1.5
Spent most of this weekend working on this animal, and I think I may have
identified the problem.
Noticed in some frames, at some camera angles, I got a black piece of
nothing, with surrounding objects and mapping intact. If you are familiar with
Stephen Kings writings, I like to call it the Langolier effect. A Langolier
consumed "past tense" and left a black void of nothing in it's wake.
The geometry affected was the flat surface of a box, that had a river bed
running through it that was created by doing a Boolean subtraction. buildings
sitting on top of this flat earth surface, seemed to be the source of this
black nothing projection across it's surface. But, the object by itself with
all others hidden would have a "hunk of nothing" running through it, at certain
camera angles.
The Langolier effect was really interfering with some views in my
animation, and I narrowed it down to a building that had been made by boolean
operations. Once I got rid of the building, and replaced with non-boolean
object, the Langolier effect went away.
Now back to the problem of render lockup. it still persisted, even with
sucessively smaller project files (less faces, less vertices…etc.). The
smaller the file, the less the occurence. When I replaced the "Boolean" objects
with simpler ones where possible, no lockup occured.
My feeling is that the boolean objects caused the lockup, as one of the
symptoms, along with the intermittent "Langolier" effect. Why? who knows, what
was special about these boolean objects?
They weren't clean. instead of nice simple joins and subtractions with
clearly defined faces, I had some very wierd and very small vertices and faces
occur.
For instance, I added a long narrow addition with a lower roof-line to one
side of a building, it was supposed to be the same length, it wasn't. It was a
clean join at the front, but at the back, it may have extended .001 inches or
less (maybe a little more…could not measure reliably). Is this a problem for
3DS, Hardware, or Graphics subsytems? Would this generate a "langolier" effect
intermittently, or cause lockup?
Could the fact that I have a flawed pentium chip be of any importance?
See if it works for you, or let me know what you think.
Mason