150.7% and Rising!

[Ky Lane]

Hey guys,

 

Got a bit of a tense one on my hands - using Zaps slice script, I ran my 21,000x6,000 pixel render off last night, and it failed on the last slice - a bit of a displacement issue. Anyway, removed the displacement map, and its getting past 7% of the photon calc finally - however, the photon calc has completed, and while it was completeing the render info box kept swapping to a "rendering" calc phase, which is now (after about 2hrs) 157.9%

 

How do I know if/when this phase will complete? Any ideas?

[SandmanNinja]

Ugh - I had that happen before. Same exact behaviour. Switching back and forth.

 

I left it overnight and it was over 400% and still climbing when I woke up!

 

I gave up on it, as it was just a test scene.

 

It doesn't like something in that last square.

 

I ran that script on an existing scene at 8000x6000 with 9 slices and it ran beautifully.

I used HIGH default settings for both AA and FG and the system resources never went above 2.5 gigs of ram. That's a sweet little script.

 

I have a feeling that the problem is not the script but rather the size and maybe your settings for a render of that size.

 

I'll be watching this for the fix, as it's a weird problem.

[Ky Lane]

Yeah, bloody annoying. Ive redone a few of the materials unique to that area.. soon see.

 

Script is great, but could do with some fine tuning. Default image save folder is in the boonies, and theres no render indo box, so no idea how its doing until its done really.

 

But, it got all bar one sqare of the 21,000 x 6000 render done!

[SandmanNinja]

If nothing else, photoshop / crop that 1 square out!

 

Since it's a script, it should be pretty easy to modify the save path.

Can't remember if i ticked it or not, but there is an option to 'view renders while doing it' (obviously I'm misremembering the exact name). I could see my buckets chugging away.

 

Weird naming convention for the file chunks. my-render-01, then 10, then 20... I thought it was binary at first...

[Michael J. Brown]

Ky, in which month of Zap's blog archives is that slice script found? This is the first I've heard of it, and from the jist of this tread I'm assuming that this script makes it easier (or possible) to render rediculously high resolution stills without crashing ones workstation???

[Spacelord]

I was wondering if you needed to run the photon map at the same res.

Instead calculate the photon map at half the res then reload it for the final high res.

 

I normally render large renders into strips with backburner, it works a treat.

I've got one render which is only 5000px wide over 3 machines, 2 quadcores and 1 dualcore which has been rendering for days ! These damn portal lights/area shadows are really slow.

 

In Maya a new feature that comes with mr3.6+ is an advanced framebuffer memory management, its a cache mode that saves to disk so not in memory.

This allows you to render super huge renders.

Pity 3dsmax didn't get it, fingers crossed for the 2010.

[Ky Lane]

I was thinking the same - just need to figure out how to do it in MR

[Spacelord]

Just set it to render at a lower res, click the generate photon map for now, let it finish,

load the finished photon map, hit the freeze button, set your render settings for the final size and your away.

 

cheers