Scanline rendering freezes mid-frame

[Varchi]

I'm rendering a 10 second animation @ 24fps. The model is quite large. There are 6 buildings and a large (but not insanely detailed) terrain. There are two large cylinders beyond the terrain with respective sky and treeline textures.

 

The cameras are set to run along paths over the 10 seconds. There are 9 cameras; so, I set up a batch render for the animations.

 

On the first camera/render/video the rendering will stop in the middle of rendering a frame. Sometimes it's frame 4. Sometimes it's others. The first few will render fine with a slight hesitation as the line approaches and crosses the buildings in the distance, but usually around frame 8 it stops completely at the buildings in the distance.

 

This is only a scanline rendering of simple geometry. I can't understand or troubleshoot the reason it's stopping randomly so early on in the animation frames.

 

Any ideas why this is happening? Am i missing any important details?

I've tried all the types of video compression as well.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

First, don't render to a video format. Render to frames, and the reassemble into a video once it is done rendering. I don't think is causing the crashes, but it is a general workflow issue.

 

As for troubleshooting...

 

Second. Check your RAM, are you using more than you have? ...if so, maybe try switching to mr. I think you could use mr as a scanline engine, and still have it load and unload geometry per bucket. One of the mr guys here might be able to verify this.

 

Third, place a new matte material on everything, and hit render. Does it crash? If not, then the problem is in one of your materials.

 

Fourth, it might be corrupt geometry. Divide your model up into layers. Turn on 20% of the layers and hit render. Does it crash? ....if not, try the next 20% and so on until it does. Once you find the set of layers causing the crash begin testing in smaller sets of layers until you identify the layer with the corrupt geometry. Then figure out which piece of geometry it is, and rebuild it from scratch.

 

Alternately, if it is geometry or a material, and the crash is at a certain point in the screen, then that is probably where the material or geometry causing the problem is located in the screen.

 

Fifth, ...reset your render engine. This work best with mr or Vray, but it might work with scanline also. Switch to a different engine, hit render, then switch back to your engine of choice, and redo your settings from scratch, or from presets that are already verified to render correctly.

[Varchi]

I don't know why I didn't think to identify texture and geometry problems via elimination. Thanks for the input.

I'm going to have to keep these options in mind for the future.

 

As for the problem at hand. Max was peaking at 1gb ish for ram consumption. 2010 64bit. I have max 6gb ddr3.

I still might proceed with your suggestions, but the odd thing is, rendering without the batch actually worked. It still hesitated at the freezing points of the render, but it crunched through to the next frame. I checked all the settings that I can I think to check between the batch setup and the regular setup. They both look the same. Does this shed any light on the issue at hand? Does the batch render option behave differently?

 

Also yes, I'll start rendering individual frames from now on. It makes sense and seems that it would reduce the potential points for error. Is After Effects the best option for post? I have both AE and premiere.