#Crashing question
4 messages in this thread
I have a question regarding crashing during rendering and wonder if anyone has
any idea what it could be. I talked with Autodeesk Tech Support and they don't
have a clue either. Here's what's happening.
During rendering the system hangs. But if I turn off shadows or reduce the
verticies, it will render to completion. So, crashing is render
size/complexity-dependent. My guess is that when it attempts to go out to the
virtual disk for extra memory, it fails. Yet I get the usual AOBBABAO file with
0 bytes in the root when I return indicating that it did attempt to write
something. This condition is new to me but is related to my model size – its
the largest I built on this system, about 75,000 vertices.
Here's what I have and what I've done. The system is Micronics 486 with 32 MB
of RAM with 132 MB remaining on a 1.2 gB disk. I use a Vista board and Hecules
Graphite board and use QEMM. The system fails on my backup of 3ds.
I stripped QEMM, checked CFIG386 values, verified 3DS.SET values, CHKDSKed, and
spent about 3 days so far trying to diagnose the problem. The file renders OK
on other systems.
The sad part of the story is that I had a deadline to meet. So after a few
weeks of work and only hours left till deadline, I couldn't get the system
running and lost the contract – and $4000.
Any ideas?
Thanks – Gregory MacNicol
Gregory,
Your exact symptoms don't sound familiar, but the overall syndrome is very
familiar. Once you seem to go over some mysterious number in swap file size,
the swap file size starts growing each frame, and will eventually cause an
error because your disk is full. You can get away with a slight bit of a swap
file, but that's it. I have no specific inside knowledge of the program to
represent that as a fact, but it's definitely my experience. About the only
thing you can possibly do is hide any geometry that isn't being used at the
moment (out of camera view) or try to use a smaller shadow map. That one got
me into severe problems this weekend where I may also lose a project because of
not being able to get the program to work properly and not being able to get
any help. My shadows started dancing around. The size of your bitmap is also
someplace you might try to economize. Otherwise, it's off to buy more RAM. But
then again, if we were made of money and could afford $3000 support contracts,
maybe we just would have gone out and bought an SGI, Alias, and Softimage <g>.
Don't feel alone. If you have any problems that my humble experience might be
able to help, just ask.
Roger D.
Gregory,
If the problem is occurring during paging, I'd suspect an
incompatibility problem with your hard disk controller, or a disk full
condition. RE: controllers, the problem is relatively common with clone IDE
controllers, but the size of your disk points to SCSI as most likely being your
implementation. Caching controllers have been known to demonstrate such
problems, though. So, is it a SCSI caching controller?
Kevin Krell – Computer Support Associates
If the file renders OK on other systems, and it's a memory-related crash, the
problem is definitely hardware-related. As Kevin says, it's either a bad hard
disk controller, bad hard disk, or an out-of-memory condition that's not being
handled by the system correctly.
– G