Are there more detailed logs? Iray erroring out a lot.

SethM

Is there any way to get more information in the logs? Some sort of verbosity setting, maybe? I'm getting a lot of Iray errors that bail out of the render very early (usually a preview render) and I'd love to know what I'm doing to make Iray unhappy.

I tried sacrificing a Radeon card to propitiate the CUDA demons, but they did not accept my offering.

     Seth.

 

Tobor

Not aware of a switch, but the first thing to try (after rebooting your machine) is a CPU-only render. That will remove issues related to driver compatibility, compute level, and memory size.

Since you mention you exchanged a Radeon card for a nVidia card with CUDA cores. I am assuming your problem existed when doing CPU-only renders. Still, for troubleshooting, it's best to leave the card out for now.

Apart from the above, you might also wish to completely redo your scene, and/or create a simple one with just a few primitives. In the past, I've had issues when rendering certain shaders that were either bad to begin with, or became corrupted somehow. One file, with an imported V4 skin to Genesis 2, allowed me to render only once or twice before throwing a tantrum.

SethM

I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. The comment about sacrificing a Radeon card was a joke. I meant a sacrifice involving robes and an altar, or maybe a volcano. I haven't put a Radeon card inside a computer in at least a decade.

The scene I've been getting errors on today is falling back to CPU render anyway, since I only have a 2Gb NVidia card :-( I'll try excluding or removing things and try to isolate if it's one shader or material causing the problem. I hadn't thought of that (I'd assumed it was the scene as a whole, but a specific object would make a lot of sense). Thanks!

     Seth.

 

Tobor

If it's only 2 GB the first suspicion is that the RAM is insufficient, especially if you're using the same card for display. Textures contribute to a lot of RAM use, and if it's that, you can try decreasing the resolution of the textures.

I am able to get many single character (clothed, with hair) scenes to fit a secondary 2GB card that I also use for the monitor, but not all scenes are cooperative. On those, thw 2GB card will drop out, leaving me only my "main" card, with a whopping 384 cores. Yippee!!

mjc1016

Tobor said:

If it's only 2 GB the first suspicion is that the RAM is insufficient, especially if you're using the same card for display. Textures contribute to a lot of RAM use, and if it's that, you can try decreasing the resolution of the textures.

I am able to get many single character (clothed, with hair) scenes to fit a secondary 2GB card that I also use for the monitor, but not all scenes are cooperative. On those, thw 2GB card will drop out, leaving me only my "main" card, with a whopping 384 cores. Yippee!!

With some careful texture fiddling a clothed, with hair character and 'light weight' backdrop can be rendered on a 1 GB card...even if used for monitor duty (maybe not on Windows, though...I'm well under 200 MB in that area, often under 100 MB for OS use...gotta love a lighterwieght OS UI......currently 86 MB, and that's with Firefox open).  

And even a lowly 96 CUDA cores beats out a CPU only render.

Anyway...bragging aside...

What does the log file currently say?

You can cut and paste some of the errors you are getting.

SethM

I keep track of when I'm falling out of the GPU because of memory. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but I'm surprised how many times I can get back under 2 GB (even with the monitors on the same card) by removing objects I know aren't relevant  (is there no CPU-based object cull before the GPU render phase?), converting duplicate objects to instances, simplifying textures, etc.

In this case, it's actually just stopping with a few iterations complete. No message about success or failure sometimes, just stopping without convergence, and other times I get an Iray error in the logs.

It looks like the log is circular and my last errors have rolled off from the "restarting Daz Studio" logline flood. I'll see if I can reproduce.

mjc1016

Usually if it just errors out without much of anything in the log, it's  an item in the scene.

And yes, the log gets overwritten.

No, as far as can tell, no culling before rendering.

 

SethM

It'll take me a while to get back to a state where I can repro that error. I really do wish we could up the verbosity on the logs, though. While rebuilding things I've spent hours tracking down which objects are generating "WARNING: dzneuraymgr.cpp(261): Iray WARNING - module:category(IRAY:RENDER):   1.7   IRAY   rend warn : RTKernel: please check the input geometry (degenerated/inefficient RT hierarchy)" (so far it's objects in several commercial sets that I really like). And I have no idea if that warning actually makes a difference in the memory or time cost to the renders.

Were I fantasizing about the log file (I'm a software developer; sadly, log files are one of our more persistent fantasies), I'd also love a timestamp every now and then, so I can keep track of which render each log block went with.

mjc1016

SethM said:

Were I fantasizing about the log file (I'm a software developer; sadly, log files are one of our more persistent fantasies), I'd also love a timestamp every now and then, so I can keep track of which render each log block went with.

And the ability to decide to overwrite or append...

Richard Haseltine

DAZ Studio : Incremented build number to 4.9.2.43

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• Added a timestamp at the front of log messages

SethM

Richard Haseltine said:

DAZ Studio : Incremented build number to 4.9.2.43

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• Added a timestamp at the front of log messages

Yay! *KermitFlail*

Can't wait. Thank you!