Question to HowieFarkes' Country-Sets
AndyS
Posts: 1,438
Hi,
if I see the details of the really nice country sets ("Country Lane 2", "Harpwood Trail") my question is how these do work with iRay. This is because of my bad experience with larger sets.
Up to now I tried a set using the Campground 57 - here only the ground and only one of the 3 wood-sets. As the building I installed The Barn. Only rendering with a few Genesis characters needed a memory far above the 16 GB mark. Now I tried to make the barn the home of some horses. With only 1 Millennium Horse in very poor low resolution I still succeeded to render. But the coat showed many of these hard shadow edges. After setting the "Render Sub-D" to 3 (what I learnt from hints here in the forum) I hardly could render. iRay started, but after about 1 hour and 50% result iRay crashed.
Trying more horses, even in low resolution was completely useless. Momory running over 24 GB and iRay crashing at once due to internal memory allocation errors.
As far as I know, there aren't any GPU-cards able to cover it. So CPU-only render is possible sentenced with the astronomical render durations.
So the question really is with these details in the Harpswood Trail and perhaps adding some characters and vehicles / horses at reasonable resolution, how does iRay work with it ???
Somebody already tried?
What does the "Iray Memory Assistant" tell about it?
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Comments
Only Harpwood Trail, at this time, is for DS. Country Lane 2 is a Carrara product. The use of instances in Harpwood Trail should greatly reduce the system load, though you may need to change the optimisation setting from speed to memory according to the creator (who initially had issues getting the set to work in Iray).
When you say you used a low resolution horse does that refer to textures or mesh? If you haven't tried reducing texture size I would advise doing so - especially for figures that are not near the camera - as the textures can eat a lot of RAM. Also check that you aren't using a high setting for figure or material level SubD as that can push memory use.
Hi Richard,
Aha !
What you say about instances is for loading into the workspace, as far as I read over here.
The render engine itself treats the instance the same as the original. (Poly count of the original * ( 1 + number_of_instances) )
As I tried such things, each additional instance caused iray to crash the same way, as it did with simply duplicate.
Scene-Info only showed measures of the original, but the memory need of iray increased dramatically.
You may correct me if I'm wrong.
But you also may try it with the rolling planes of FirstBastion or the Summer Camp 57 of Collective3D.
As I initially posted, I had to increase the Render Sub-D due to the bothering sharp shadow edges on the coats. Obviously caused by the "low" poly of the body (is this what you call mesh?).
The horses were the Millennium Horses and they are "that close" to the camera, so it is absolutely necessary to apply a better resolution. Barn and Campground were unchanged, except applied the iRay Uber shader.
Related to the texture resolution:
If you use the original textures, with iRay you get a lot of these bothering diagonal artifact lines. If you increase the resolution 2000 pix -> 4000 pix -> 8000 pix, they slowly disappear (getting signifiantly smaller).
For the horses it is from DWD with 3000pix resolution unchanged.
Set the Instance Optimisation to Memory not Speed and you should find that instances use far less memory than separate models.
Hi Richard,
nice hint.
But where to find this parameter?
I just scanned the daz online docu in vain.
In the Optimisation group in the Editor tab of the Render Settings pane.
Hi Richard,
thank you. Although the parameter is named a little different (perhaps that's why I couldn't find it in the wiki).
And useful as long the environment / props offer the chance.
But I'm still in dought, that I can insert some actors and their "vehicles" into that environment for render with iray.
I did a short test with only 3 Mil-Horses. Nothing else - only these and even in low resolution. Blank scene, nothing else, sun-sky only.
No Way ! iRay crashed at once after 1.5 min.
So if you say that only the environment of Harpwood Trail is already stressing the iRay limits - what useful additional can be put into it?
Andy
I just loaded three Mil Horses, each with a different texture set, and rendering wityh the Iray defaults at 1,000 pixels square the GPU was using ionly 584MB (for all open applications and the desktop, not just Iray). So I don't know why Iray is crashing but it seems unlikely it is due to memory exhaustion.
I just loaded three Mil Horses, each with a different texture set, and rendering wityh the Iray defaults at 1,000 pixels square the GPU was using ionly 584MB (for all open applications and the desktop, not just Iray). So I don't know why Iray is crashing but it seems unlikely it is due to memory exhaustion.
Hi Richard,
that really sounds strange. Please find the scene file attached. The textures used are from DWD (freebee).
The windows memory is not the problem. I ever get this iRay access violation message (in the debug details) from the iray plugin.
Well, first an oops on my part - I'd been working in the beta but opened the release version to do my previous test render and that was set to 3Delight. I don't have the texture sets you used, but using three of the Daz textures I'm stil getting a pretty reasonable 2.5GB (and I have the beta DS version open too, with a scene loaded but with all renders close, so that is accounting for a chunk of that). You do have one level of SubD applied to the models, which will slightly increase memory usage, but there's no further SubD in the material settings so the affect should be slight.
Hi Richard,
related to the memory I get the same result (round 0.5 GB). But iRay crashes at once. In my latest test after 23 sec preparation, I got the crash.
Message: "The thread tried to read or write on a virtual address it is not authorized to." Comes from iRay mi_plugin_factory()+ and then a realy high value of MBs.
For me that looks as if nVidia has a real problem with proper internal memory management. Internal related to the iRay plugin.
But I know: we're very far off-topic now. ;)
Are you talking about Dreamweavers textures?
http://freezone.thefantasiesattic.net/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=138_165&zenid=5a7ad4f3a1a90859e763276dee96b79f
As far as I rember those are quite heavy on ressources ...
Which version of DS is this - Help>About Daz Studio?
Hi Kerya,
Heavy on ressources?
As I wrote they're 3000pix resolution (diffuse, bump, specular), which is just good enough to get rid off those bothering diagonal artefact lines.
All adapted applying the iRay Uber shader.
@ Richard,
perhaps you remember
, I'm sentenced to stay at 4.8 or leave it.
P.S.
I opened a bug report, becaus it only consumes 0.5 GB building the render buffer, but the render engine itself internally excceeds its memory arrays.
Ah, the 4.8 version of Iray did crash with some meshes - try turning off the CPU and see if you can render that way.
Pardon?
In the Advanced tab of Render Settings uncheck the CPU, leaving just the GPU - that should, as I recall, avoid the crash if it's the Iray bug, though it does mean you have to switch settings if the scene is too big for the GPU's memory.
But ... ääähhh !
I don't have any GPU.
Who is supposed to do the render without the CPU?
Me?
Manually?
Hope, you understand my (shock) confusion.
Sorry, I misunderstood - I thought you were using a GPU and that was why you were worrying about memory. If not then I'm not sure there is a workaround for the Iray crash, though you could try turning OptiX acceleration off (or on), also in the Advanced tab of Render Settings.
Ok, I see.
But I can't understand why especially these horses are a problem. As I saw this scene only needs 0.5 GB.
At the moment I have a render running exceeding 16 GB cashed on the HDDs. And it renders without any problem. CPU-only of cause. But the small test scene won't.
I remember a case longer ago with 3Delght:
There I had a character with the "Bulkman"-morph applied. Each time reaching the character, 3Delight got stuck. After removing that special morph, the render was no problem.
Yes, geometry (or a mixture of Geometry and textures) can cause issues - unfortuantely I don't have 4.8 so I can't test to see if there's a general issue with the horse.
Hi Richard,
further investigations showed, that only the change of the resolution method cause the crash. And it seems to be an iray bug related to memory management for the variables arrays.
Attached you see the task-manager memory usage. Not really dramatic.
The yellow arrow:
Resolution is set to Base. Render succeeds.
The green arrow:
At that time I changed to high res with still base SubD level (1).
The red arrow:
Render crashes although the overall memory usage is the same as for base resolution.
Conclusion:
For high res you should expect a valuably higher memory usage. As you see, iRay don't. iRay isn't considering the need of sufficient memory for changed resolution of the mesh.
At least that's it what it looks like and 100% fits to the error message of (variables memory ) access violation.
It could also be that the memory use spikes and crashes too quickly for task Manger or GPU-Z to see.
OK, that's possible.
But what is really strange is:
In the viewport using the iRay view I succeed to render 3 horses in real high resolution (render SubD = 3) without any problems. Contrary to that in real render even at the normal level (SubD = 1) iRay crashes at once.
The preview mode lacks some features that are in the render, so presumably the crash relates to one (or more) of those. I can't recall exactly what the differences are, however.
OK, so far.
Now, knowing this, it would be easy for the developers to look at the differences to identify and eliminate the reason for the crash.
And for my impression, the outcome of the preview was way better compared to the real render (at least for the effect of reflected lights).
Well, if this is the 4.8 issue nVidia did look at and eliminate the crash - but the updated version of Iray is the one in 4.9+ - although if it's simply memory then there's nothing to be done, short of a video card upgrade.
For me as a developer myself that "access violation" error looks more like addressing a wrong variable's type.
If you try to put a long into an integer or address the element no 150 of an array field with only 100 elements, you normally get exactly this error message.
I have some still open bug reports in this direction. But since about a year no response that it would be fixed.