#Help! Help!
13 messages in this thread
Hi, everyone. I have a couple of odd problems, would like light shed on them
if you have any. 1) In rendering a flc using network rendering with 1 machine,
I had some frames rendering in 1 minute 50 seconds, and others rendering in 1
hour 50-some minutes! The animations were simple and straightforward, and
there were no complex opjects that popped in and out of the scene (which is
what I would normally expect to cause significantly different frame rendering
times). The short rendering frames were the first 11 or so, and the last 70 or
so. The long rendering frames were the roughly 10 between the first 11 and the
last 70. Any ideas? 2) Different project: I am using Vary.sxp to cause objects
to fade to total transparency. I am also using the hide keys in the keyframer
to cause objects to appear and disappear during the animation. When I try to
render this animation as a flic, it gets to the last frame of the range I asked
it to render, and I get these messages: "Cannot create temporary file
c:\3ds3\temp\$FLIW1$.TMP". I click OK, then I get "Error#-6 in making
post_med". I find that I =can= render the frames as individual GIF files, and
I could always pull these into Animator Pro and stitch them together into a
flic, but I =really= would prefer it if 3DS would make the flic for me. Any
suggestions?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Madeline
Hi Madeline,
<< The short rendering frames were the first 11 or so, and the last 70 or so.
The long rendering frames were the roughly 10 between the first 11 and the last
70. Any ideas? >>
My line of questioning would be..
how much memory do you have?
does 3ds see all of it?
are you using a medium or custom pallete? (both prefered over high)
how much disk space do you have?
if you render a range of 1-11 and then do an Info Status, are you paging
heavily to disk?
jonas[adesk]
Hi, Jonas. Thanks for responding to my anguished cries. To answer your
questions: the machine is a 60 Mhz Pentium with 32 megs of ram. I think 3ds
sees all (or nearly all) of it. In either case, the project is modest and
normally doesn't come near using all that ram. I always render flics with a
medium palette. The machine has about 800 megs of free disk space on two
different drives; at the time there was 300 or more megs free on each drive.
As to the info status after the first 11 frames – didn't have a chance to try
that, since it was a network render, and I found out about the rendering times
by looking at the log the next morning. I still have that log…would there be
any point in uploading it?
Thanks in advance,
Madeline
P.S. I may try to re-render the problem part of the animation and see what
happens while I'm watching it.
I wonder if your "Cannot create temporary file c:\3ds3\temp\$FLIW1$.TMP" error
comes from a setting in your 3DS.SET file. Look at the various entries in the
IMAGE-PATH, etc section. Make sure none of them specify a root directory, such
as "C:\". Make sure each entry is valid and active (no ":" in front of the
line). Also, try changing some of the settings to other directories, such as
"C:\temp" instead of "C:\3ds3\temp".
If this helps, could you let us know? Someone else was asking the same
question.
Thanks for the suggestions, Nik. I'll try it and see what happens, and I'll
let you know. Incidentally, I was also having some problems when I was using a
network drive as one of my map paths (same project as the one with the "cannot
create" message). It seemed that as long as I had that network path in there,
3ds could find the maps in the network directory, but it acted like it couldn't
find any of the maps in the =local= directories! This was true even when I put
the local directory as the image path, as the very first map path, etc. I
finally got fed up and just copied all the texture maps into a local directory.
This isn't a pressing problem, but I thought you might want to know about it.
Thanks for your help,
Madeline
<<It seemed that as long as I had that network path in there, 3ds could find
the maps in the network directory, >>
This sounds like a network file sharing problem. Are you running SHARE.EXE or
an equivelent?
-Brian
Hi, Brian. To tell the truth, I don't know a lot about this network. I'm
working as a contractor at a large communications company, and they have all
the machines networked. I think they're using Netware, but I'm not sure. I
was hoping we could do some network rendering when things get busy; I hope this
problem doesn't bode ill for that. If nothing else, I guess we better try out
network rendering =before= the crunch hits and get any bugs out of the process
while there's still time.
FWIW, when these network-related problems happen, it seems to mess up 3DS
afterwards: it refuses to save the project, it refuses to shell out to DOS,
etc. I have to get out of the program (losing any unsaved work), and come back
in again.
Madeline
>> Look at the various entries in the IMAGE-PATH, etc section. Make sure none
of them specify a root directory, such as "C:\".<<
PMJI, but I was wondering what the reason is for this? I often render
.TGA's to my optical drive, then later call them into VP to put to tape. I
usually just render .tga's to the root directory, and have "d:\" as an
image-path. Am I flirting with disaster?
Paul
"Am I flirting with disaster"
Not that I know of. I was passing on information (the C:\ setting) that seemed
to work for one customer, but it doesn't explain all the successful
occurrences.
Hi, Nik. I tried your suggestions; they didn't make any difference – I'm still
getting the dreaded message. All the settings in the 3DS.set file were plain
vanilla; they hadn't been changed from the defaults.
This problem only seems to happen with this one project, which is fairly large
(about 90,000 faces). For now, I'm OK with generating .gif files and putting
them together myself, but I sure would like to resolve this.
Madeline
<<This problem only seems to happen with this one project, which is fairly
large (about 90,000 faces). >>
Does this mean you have other projects which work fine? Are any of them about
the same size?
-Brian
You asked if I have other projects that work fine producing flic
files. Yes, I do. None of them is as big as this one, though, and I
=think= I remember (but can't swear to it) that when this project was
smaller, I was able to produce a flic from it. The only other
problem I've had when rendering flics is the aforementioned situation
where different frames in the same flic take drastically different
(60-fold) times to render, even though there is nothing in the flic
that ought to cause that. I still don't have an answer on that
one…
<<You asked if I have other projects that work fine producing flic
files. Yes, I do. None of them is as big as this one, though, and I
=think= I remember (but can't swear to it) that when this project was
smaller, I was able to produce a flic from it>>
This tells me you are running out of resources, the only question is
which ones. What pallete setting are you using? How much RAM and Hard
drive space do you have available? What resolution are you rendering
to? What drivers are your pharlap and temporary files pointing
towards. How much space is available on those drives?