Max started freezing while rendering

JohnnySix

Am using Max 2008, just rendering a 400 frame scene to AVI @ 640*360 from a scene with sub 2k polys , and no advanced lighting, using just scanline renderer.

I turned on the 'conserve memory' checkbox, but it doesn't seem to make any difference.

Is it just a case of the summer heat causing the machine to overheat or something, or is there some other varible I can tweak to save the numerous freezes (whole system locks up can't be saved without a reset ) .

Machine is about 4 years old, but I guess reasonable spec, at least, things have been rendering okay before.

AMD Athlon 64 3200 , 1.5gb Ram , NVidia 6800 GT - a little lower spec than I guess a lot of people are using, but has generally been okay rendering far more complex things until recently.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

NoisyMonk

Hmmm.. that is a pretty old machine you've got there, and thats definitely one of the factors to your problem. It may not be the direct cause of the problem, but it isn't helping. You could try turning up the Memory Limit, should be near where you turned on 'Conserve Memory', but I can't remember for sure without checking.

The simplest thing you could do is just render in 100(or 50 or whatever) frame chunks and then stitch them together afterwards.

Mark Dygert

With only 1.5gb of ram you're lucky to be doing much of anything besides running windows. If its a heat damaged system the ram is normally the first to go, so you might want to upgrade/replace the ram when you get a chance, if not replace the whole thing. Heat damage tends to accumulate over time and when it happens once, it never really heals.

Make sure to turn off "Rendered Frame Window" in the render setup window. It will shut off the preview window you see when its render, saving quite a bit of system resources but still getting the job done.

Try rendering to raw frames such as png or tga then use Ram Player or After Effects to combine them into a avi.

Check and make sure all your textures are properly linked. File > Asset Tracking (if you get a bunch of nonsense about vault you should uninstall vault because you're probably not using it and it renders asset tracking near useless.

Once Vault is gone it will show you if your textures are missing, found or ok. You want them all set to ok.

Try setting up a backburner local server and render using "network rendering". Then use monitor to catch any errors that pop up.

Toast

JohnnySix wrote: »

Am using Max 2008, just rendering a 400 frame scene to AVI @ 640*360 from a scene with sub 2k polys , and no advanced lighting, using just scanline renderer.

why would you render to video? this is exactly the reason why you render to image sequences, so when something does happen to your system, you don't have to start rendering from the beginning of your sequence. just render from where it stopped.

JohnnySix

Hey guys, thanks for all the suggestions!

I had a tinker around, thinking maybe I could tidy the wires in the case and get a little airflow back onto the memory - as it turns out, the thing hadn't been cleaned out in a while - I must've brushed half a pound of dust from it, the inside was like a hoover bag.

Now I've dusted of the thick cake of accumulated detritus from the heat-sinks and fans, it seems to be rendering now (touch wood) without any crashes. :thumbup:


The RAM player is a great tip by the way thanks Vig - played a little with post stuff in Photoshop on a couple of frames, then viewed it back as video in the Ram player, then exported with no worries right to Avi.

Fantastic, thanks all!