PDA

View Full Version : XSI crashes when rendering

toonafish
05-09-2007, 10:18 AM
I have this scene in 6.01 Essentials that will render just 18 frames and then crashes. I've been trying to render it for 2 nights just to come into in the office in the morning and find XSI has crashed to the desktop. So in 2 nights of rendering I have 37 frames to show for :-/

It's a basic scene with a character that is standing still and just the camera is moving. I use FG with a Phisycal Sky.

The same scene kept on crashing when I would render a single frame because I had some polygons hidden. After deleting the same polygons and freezing the stack it seemed the problem was solved...not.

I've been having problems like this from the very beginning I started using mental ray in XSI for rendering so my impression is that MR is extremely unstable on my system.

does anyone have the same experience and have a clue on what could cause this ?
JDex
05-09-2007, 12:11 PM
Have you reviewed the log? Have you optimized the scene and used diagnostics to make sure it's efficient? Are you using Batch or rendering from in the interface?

I've found that 99% of the time, when I have a crash... it's because I screwed up.

I've just finished rendering 3200 frames (6-12 passes each) that are over 2k involving meshes with more than 1mil polygons... when I set things up right, it was smooth as silk. When I overlooked something, or tried to just rush it through, I had bad day.

After 126 hours in the last 6 days... I've learned that MR is very, very... very, very stable.
toonafish
05-09-2007, 01:20 PM
After 126 hours in the last 6 days... I've learned that MR is very, very... very, very stable.

Good for you, but don't overdo it, you might have to eat your words one day :-)

I can imagine MR beeing very stable when you're experienced enough to know what pitfalls to look out for, or what should not be overlooked or forgotten.

And what exactly do you call user errors considering XSI crashing to the desktop ? When MR crashes because I've hidden some polygons instead of deleting them, do you call that a user error ? Is that something I overlooked and I tried to rush things ? Or would that be a MR error and maybe even a bug ?
JDex
05-09-2007, 01:29 PM
I can't say... because you've hardly posted any info about what you're rendering.

Hiding polys has not caused me a crash ever, but I can't say for sure if I've ever rendered with hidden polys... because I am quite certain that I unhide polys shortly after hiding them. There are better ways of making areas of a mesh not visible to the renderer... such as using texture maps in conjunction with the passes/partitions framework. Of course, I suppose it could be a bug, but is it repeatable... with different scenes, on different machines? If it is... you need to log it with Softimage/MR.

Well, my comp is finished... it's off to edit, and I'm off to bed. Best of luck.
toonafish
05-09-2007, 01:54 PM
yep, the hidden polygons crash is repeatable. I just have to load the object, hide some polygons and hit preview.
I just sent the scene to support.

thanks, and good night :-)
CGTalk Moderation
05-09-2007, 01:54 PM
This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.