Maya Batch Render Stops Randomly

#1

Ok, so I’m having this problem that happens pretty much everytime I render. It stops rendering for some reason in the middle of a render! I want to leave it to render overnight or something and it stops after 20 minutes!
Here are some of my render settings:
Its exporting as a JPEG
My render layer is Master Layer and Im rendering using Mental Ray
My frame/animation ext is name.#.ext
Frame padding is 4
Presets are HD 1080
and its rendering in pixels

I dont know if I need more ram to be put into the program because I dont know how much ram is already being pu into the program, If so please tell me how to check it or add more.
Anything Helps!
Thanks

#2

You are lucky it quits after only 20 minutes rather than hours or something.
If you are on a windows system then start task_manager and it will show you how much memory is being used(taskmanager has an option for memory statistics turn on peak memory). Also since you are probably launching Mayabatch from within Maya, your system has two copies of the required memory of your scene. If its quitting due to memory limits you should learn how to run render.exe from command line or at least quit maya right after you launch mayabatch to free up the memory used up by interactive Maya.

How much memory do you have on your system?

#3

Sorry Im on a mac, do you know if this changes anything?

#4

My comments are the same, just use the activity monitor with the system memory tab activated so you can see how much memory is being used.
How much total memory is on your system?

Here is an old forum post that will help you with command line rendering in osx
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-892507.html

#5

Okay my batch render is using 209.1 MB
and maya is using 204.7 MB

is that good or bad? If its bad, please tell me what to do to fix it.
Thanks so much!

#6

that is very small amount of memory so memory is unlikely to be your problem
I assume your computer have many gigabytes of memory … I keep asking how much total ram you have … do you know?

I assume when you render to renderview it renders fine … is that right?

Next step is to have Maya print out mentalray progress report which hopefully will indicate what the problem is.
Batch Render has a square next to it … when you click on that a dialog opens … switch verbosity level to “progress messages” … then when you run mayabatch, hopefully it will print something that will indicate what the problem is.
you may have to run mayabatch in command line to actually see the progress printing
refer to the link I sent about commandline rendering in osx

#7

Wow thanks for all you help!
It says my flash storage is 121 GB and that I have 27 Gb left of storage free on my computer.

Ok, so I changed the verbosity in the batch render box and I didn’t see any error messages and didn’t know how to run mayabatch with command line so I went to the thread you told me to go to and didn’t see anything to help me there. If you know how to do this could you tell me if its not to much trouble?
sorry I am quite new to maya :stuck_out_tongue:
Thanks,
Gabe

#8

Mayabatch saves a log file called mayaRenderLog.txt in your project directory.
If you set the “progressMessages” in the batchrendering options then this text file will contain the printed details about the render.

You may want to delete mayaRenderLog.txt first and start your batchrender again because every time you batch render the log gets appended.

When you find that file paste its contents here.

#9

Are you using particles and are they cached?

#10

Mavericks?

#11

There’s a bug with mental ray in mavericks where it will just stall sometimes for no apparent reason. If you have a render queue manager (Deadline, Smedge, etc) you can set it to auto-restart the job if it takes more than a certain amount of time.

#12

Yes Ive seen other posts of people complaining about mayabatch rendering failures with mavericks. I wonder if its a unique problem with mentalray and not other renderers.
It sounds like Maya consistently renders into renderview. So perhaps you should consider creating a script that renders and saves all you frames from within Maya interactive. This wouldnt be the first time mayabatch fails for whatever other reasons.

#13

I have had this same problem with maya on Mac since maya5… And have never figured out why. I blame Maya’s implementation on Mac, as I don’t have same issues on win maya

#14

I’m having the same problem right now, with mental ray Maya 2015 osx. We have found out that our new mac pros have a serious problem with memory leaks, and my mental ray batch render appears to be failing when I press play in nuke or other things like that. I tried lowering my memory and thread limits without success. It certainly does not do that on my windows system.

#15

Only the local batch render fail, rendering on the farm / command line seems to be stable.

#16

It was never a problem on older versions of Maya before Mavericks. Anyway, it’s fixed in Maya 2015 SP4:

MAYA-42100 mental ray batch render hangs on Mac OS X

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/downloads/caas/downloads/content/autodesk-maya-2015-service-pack-4.html?v=2015