That damn bucket is stuck. Help!

[Shogoki2015]

Hello guys and gals,

 

i'm kinda stuck with my render progress and need help. The depths of the internet hold no answer.

 

Here's the Problem:

Doing an arch viz interior scene in 3Ds Max Design 2014 and Vray 3.0. Scattered some plants with Forest Pack 4.3.6, some reflective surfaces. Fairly simple scene.

Set up everything, hit render, slept for 8 hours only to find that the process had been stuck at the end of pass 3 (final pass before rendering) for 4 hours at least with only one bucket showing and firmly staying in one place. Totally p***ed I tested the problematic spot using region render and voila ... worked, no problem there. With confidence back, I used region render on a larger area only to find that the render got stuck once again. This time in a different place. If VRay would just continue rendering

the rest of the picture, ignoring the problematic spot, it would be ok, but it doesn't. The final rendering pass won't start with the one bucket being stuck.

 

I found that this mostly occurs with reflective surfaces or scattered forest pack objects, but otherwise feels totally random ... in areas that are no more reflective or polygon-rich than any other part of the scene.

 

The only way to get around this, is to use small chunks of region renders step by step until the "puzzle" is complete. That means returning to the PC every 15 minutes or so. WIN!

 

It's driving me mad. Deadline is fast approaching and there seems to be no remedy. I made dozens of exterior renderings and a few interiors without this problems.

 

Please help

[Francisco Penaloza]

it can be memory related, are you using LC as second GI bounce?

it is an exterior or interior? if it is exterior, try rendering Irradiance/brute force instead.

Also check your RAM consumption, if V Ray run out of memory it start to use your Hard dist to dump memory and that take forever.

[Shogoki2015]

Thanks for the reply Francisco.

 

As I mentioned, it's an interior scene and I'm indeed using LC. I will try switching to brute force once I have completed the region render puzzle. RAM consumption is at a constant 2.1 GB when using the small region renders, but sometimes even with the small areas, there is a bucket freeze. Highest consumption I ever monitored was around 8 GB with heavier exterior scenes. Hardly consuming all my 16 GB of RAM since I always try to keep my scenes clean and simple.

 

I wonder why this starts to happen now. Didn't happen before. Weird.

[Francisco Penaloza]

if you are not hitting RAM, maybe is some texture in your landscaping.

Check the double side materials, also any normal bitmap. VRay 3 is kind of picky about it, if you open an old file and answer yes to update materials to V Ray 3 it will put a VRay normal map with a regular 3d Max normal map.

As usual, you should try to render first, with no textures (Material overwrite) then render with and without plants and try to debug that way what can be.

The strange thing is you said that the buckets are random. so that made me think it could be memory.

Can you post your Rendering settings?

[Shogoki2015]

Again, thanks for taking the time ... really appreciated.

 

dunno how to properly post an image here ... but here goes:

http://postimg.org/image/iq1e0jqc5/

[Scott Schroeder]

Is the bucket always getting stuck on a forest object? I don't have Forest open to know if you have the latest version, but I do know there was a version that with an earlier version of Vray 3 would cause buckets, usually just a single one, to hang forever. It wouldn't hang on region renders either. Only seemingly on full renders and sometimes it would go just fine. It was very random at times.

[Shogoki2015]

Hello Scott,

this version of forest pack you're talking about ... do you know if the freezing of the bucket occured while rendering a forest pack object, or did that also happen with just the forest pack object being present in the scene? As I said, this also occured with buckets far away from forest pack objects, while rendering a reflective parquet floor trough glass for example.