iray hangs - sort of...

Winthrod

First of all I want to say 'Thank you!' to SickleYield for the tutorial for iray. It has helped immensely!

The problem I am having is that I have made a scene, converted all the materials to iray uber base materials. And then I go to render it and for the first 46%, 124 iterations everything is fine. This takes just a few minutes. But after that it never seems to get any farther. The time count keeps going up like it's still working but I never get past 125 iterations. I had to go out of town for a couple of days and let it run while I was gone - and after 72 hours it's still on iteration 125. I can move the count window around and the timer still increases but the rendering has stopped.

The scene is a simple scene, G2F with a dress hair and boots, Fantasy Camp II tent with a few odds and ends thrown in for flavor. Not a complicated or heavy geometry scene at all.

The system running it is a few years old but it's Windows 8.1 64-bit, quad core processor, 8 GB RAM and a Quadro 600 video card.

Anyone have any ideas as to what to do to move past this? Would making pieces not visible take them out of the rendering process or would I have to delete them?

Any ideas are welcome and thank you in advance!

BeeMKay

I've have this problem, too. It seems to be related to the size of your image (and therefore, probably to your RAM-size). For example, when I rendered the image at 1200x1600, it got hung up, but when I rendered it at 800x1200, it worked fine.
Try rendering the scene at a smaller size and see if it works.

Jimbow

I'm having the same problem, too, but only get to around 22 iterations with this scene. Left it rendering last night to see if it gets past some kind of barrier, but nope, still at 22 iterations after 8 hours. Now it's getting to 16 iterations. As I'm rendering CPU only what seems to happen is the second set of threads go to zero activity when the hang happens. I exported as a subset to dump extraneous textures from the scene to see if it was textures causing the problem. I also got rid of the volumetric cube (for thick atmosphere) but that didn't work, either. I also deleted the caches. With memory, it only gets to using half the 16Gb of RAM.

John Sims

Ditto all of the above.

Very frustrating.

Jimbow

I saved every major element out as its own scene subset and reloaded them in one by one. Everything seemed to happily render until I loaded a G2M figure wearing armour when the hang happened. I'm wondering if lots of morphs is the problem? Anyone else fancy giving loading in individual subsets a whirl?

Jimbow

I exported the armoured G2M figure as an obj to Softimage and optimised the materials, then reimported the obj and copied the iray materials from the original figure to the obj figure. The scene seems to be rendering fine now, currently at 98 iterations as opposed to the 8 to 22 it was reaching previously. Not ideal by any means, but may be a workaround for now.

John Sims

Jimbow said:

I exported the armoured G2M figure as an obj to Softimage and optimised the materials, then reimported the obj and copied the iray materials from the original figure to the obj figure. The scene seems to be rendering fine now, currently at 98 iterations as opposed to the 8 to 22 it was reaching previously. Not ideal by any means, but may be a workaround for now.

Previously I was doing a similar thing taking obj figures out of DAZ into 3DS Max for rendering. It is much better to render the DAZ figure in DAZ as the smoothing seems to work better and gets disrupted when sent to an obj. Working in DAZ is also more convenient as you can manipulate the figures which (once an obj) I can't in 3DS Max. I can export skinned bone structures but the mesh weighting is nowhere near as good as it is in DAZ.

If they get IRAY working efficiently in DAZ I can see me bringing things in to DAZ for rendering with people rather than taking the people out. It is a very exciting prospect....assuming they can get iray to work efficiently.

BeeMKay

Jimbow said:

I exported the armoured G2M figure as an obj to Softimage and optimised the materials, then reimported the obj and copied the iray materials from the original figure to the obj figure. The scene seems to be rendering fine now, currently at 98 iterations as opposed to the 8 to 22 it was reaching previously. Not ideal by any means, but may be a workaround for now.

Have you tried to reduce the actual size of the output image?

tl155180

I've been running into trouble with Iray too. I found that rendering an empty room wasn't too bad, but as soon as I introduced Genesis2 figures into it it started taking hours to get anywhere. After 30 mins it was still only 5% through. I wonder if its because I've only got an i5 cpu.

I am using fairly large images though - roughly 1356 x 1084 each time.

Jimbow

lee_lhs said:

Have you tried to reduce the actual size of the output image?

I sure did. No effect at all. Even the spot render was hanging at c.16 iterations. I'm pretty convinced it had something to do with the G2M figure. Perhaps the number of morphs he had?

Jimbow

John Sims said:

If they get IRAY working efficiently in DAZ I can see me bringing things in to DAZ for rendering with people rather than taking the people out. It is a very exciting prospect....assuming they can get iray to work efficiently.

Ditto. Plus they need to enable EXR output, but that's apparently a possibility.

BeeMKay

Jimbow said:

lee_lhs said:

Have you tried to reduce the actual size of the output image?

I sure did. No effect at all. Even the spot render was hanging at c.16 iterations. I'm pretty convinced it had something to do with the G2M figure. Perhaps the number of morphs he had?

It shouldn#t... but then, you never know. :-(

tl155180

I am finding Iray to be considerably slower than 3Delight. I'm trying to render a room right now with just scene lights (using emissive shader) and reaching iteration 280 has taken 26 mins and the progress bar is still on 1%. This image would've been finished by now in 3Delight.

Is this normal for Iray?

Pschelfh

You should check your grapic cards :

CUDA cores : the more, the faster it will render
RAM on the card : if the ram needed for the textures exceeds your cards' ram, Iray switches to CPU (MUCH slower)

My longest render took 45 minutes, but most take between 5 and 10 minutes (Genesis 2 + environment)

I have a GTX 780 (6 Gb - 2304 CUDA cores) + GTX 970 for the view screen (4 Gb - 1664 CUDA cores).
If you only use 1 card, you also have to take into account that resources for rendering are also shared by Windows and the DAZ view screen.

I also found that the transfer of textures from DAZ to Iray (before you see something on the render screen) is MUCH slower (almost 1 min.) than with Octane. This might be even slower when you go CPU only.

Peter.

BTW : that 45 minute render was about 1000 iterations.

tl155180

peter.schelfhout said:

You should check your grapic cards :

CUDA cores : the more, the faster it will render
RAM on the card : if the ram needed for the textures exceeds your cards' ram, Iray switches to CPU (MUCH slower)

My longest render took 45 minutes, but most take between 5 and 10 minutes (Genesis 2 + environment)

I have a GTX 780 (6 Gb - 2304 CUDA cores) + GTX 970 for the view screen (4 Gb - 1664 CUDA cores).
If you only use 1 card, you also have to take into account that resources for rendering are also shared by Windows and the DAZ view screen.

I also found that the transfer of textures from DAZ to Iray (before you see something on the render screen) is MUCH slower (almost 1 min.) than with Octane. This might be even slower when you go CPU only.

Peter.

I've got an i5 4460 and a GTX 660 graphics card, so it is nVidia but I've only tried cpu rendering so far because people were saying that something like a 660 wouldn't help much with the speeds.

I'm also finding that once I stop rendering with Iray my pc becomes very sluggish and has to be restarted to get back up to speed again.

Pschelfh

tl155180 said:

peter.schelfhout said:

You should check your grapic cards :

CUDA cores : the more, the faster it will render
RAM on the card : if the ram needed for the textures exceeds your cards' ram, Iray switches to CPU (MUCH slower)

My longest render took 45 minutes, but most take between 5 and 10 minutes (Genesis 2 + environment)

I have a GTX 780 (6 Gb - 2304 CUDA cores) + GTX 970 for the view screen (4 Gb - 1664 CUDA cores).
If you only use 1 card, you also have to take into account that resources for rendering are also shared by Windows and the DAZ view screen.

I also found that the transfer of textures from DAZ to Iray (before you see something on the render screen) is MUCH slower (almost 1 min.) than with Octane. This might be even slower when you go CPU only.

Peter.

I've got an i5 4460 and a GTX 660 graphics card, so it is nVidia but I've only tried cpu rendering so far because people were saying that something like a 660 wouldn't help much with the speeds.

I'm also finding that once I stop rendering with Iray my pc becomes very sluggish and has to be restarted to get back up to speed again.

A GTX 660 has almost 1000 CUDA cores, so should be faster than your CPU.

Peter.

Pschelfh

Here is an explanation from Nvidia about CPU vs GPU processing : http://www.nvidia.com/object/what-is-gpu-computing.html

Peter.

tl155180

peter.schelfhout said:

A GTX 660 has almost 1000 CUDA cores, so should be faster than your CPU.

Peter.

Really? I'll give that a try then - thanks Peter. I coulda sworn people had been saying you needed at least 4GB of video memory to make a difference, but its worth a shot because 1% after 30mins is ridiculous.

Pschelfh

tl155180 said:

peter.schelfhout said:

A GTX 660 has almost 1000 CUDA cores, so should be faster than your CPU.

Peter.

Really? I'll give that a try then - thanks Peter. I coulda sworn people had been saying you needed at least 4GB of video memory to make a difference, but its worth a shot because 1% after 30mins is ridiculous.

It depends on your textures (and how much of the memory is already used by Windows), but since it has 2 Gb, it should be ok for 1 or 2 G2 figures.
You can't do anything wrong anyway, Iray should switch to CPU automaticaly when you exceed your GPU's memory.

If you have lots of time and patience, you could also try making reduced texture versions for your bigger scenes.

Peter.

InaneGlory

I've been having these issues with Iray hanging up since the beta came out. I've tried all kinds of combinations to understand why its happening but I've never tried a big scene without a Genesis figure in it. I've got simple scenes with one Genesis that I can't render above 700x700 and scenes that have four Genesis that render just fine at 1500x1250. DAZ is aware of the problem and is working on fixing it. Hopeful they will have a solution to this issue soon.

DAZ_Spooky

Please try a different texture set.

We have found some texture sets on G2F and G2M where how the textures were saved cause this.

If that works it may be possible to load the texture into your favorite image manipulation software and resave it to get past this. (But please try this first.)

tl155180

Spooky - do you know of any post that explains the Environment part of the new Iray render settings well? I've read all of the documentation I can find on it and I still have no idea what it does or how to use it...

DAZ_Spooky

tl155180 said:

Spooky - do you know of any post that explains the Environment part of the new Iray render settings well? I've read all of the documentation I can find on it and I still have no idea what it does or how to use it...

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/render_settings/engine/nvidia_iray/environment/start

If that doesn't answer your questions, our tech support people can handle specific questions. :)

tl155180

DAZ_Spooky said:

tl155180 said:

Spooky - do you know of any post that explains the Environment part of the new Iray render settings well? I've read all of the documentation I can find on it and I still have no idea what it does or how to use it...

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/render_settings/engine/nvidia_iray/environment/start

If that doesn't answer your questions, our tech support people can handle specific questions. :)

Thanks Spooky - thats actually the documentation I was referring to lol.

I don't know what the problem I was having was (couldn't see the dome at all or get any light from it), but I seem to have resolved it somehow through blind fumbling and trial and error. Should be able to get a better clue about it now that I can actually see it :)

InaneGlory

DAZ_Spooky said:

Please try a different texture set.

We have found some texture sets on G2F and G2M where how the textures were saved cause this.

If that works it may be possible to load the texture into your favorite image manipulation software and resave it to get past this. (But please try this first.)

Kind of worked, but not really. Now it just renders longer before hanging.

Jimbow

I've been adding to that fantasy scene and all was rendering fine, until I applied subdivision to a couple of objects, and it hanged at iteration 68. Even when I got rid of the Subdivs for rendering it still hung. So I redid the additions using an earlier version of the scene that didn't have those objects (except for the knight in armour), using non-SubDiv versions of those objects, and now it seems to be rendering without a hitch again. About to set off a big render, so I'll find out if the SubDivs were the cause of the new hang some time tonight.

Jimbow

No need to wait. Full rez at 2k tall hung at 14 iterations.

InaneGlory

When DAZ Spooky mentioned the textures I tried a scene that has been failing for me with Aiko 6 in it. At 1000x1500 it would hang up at around 200 iterations. Tried same scene but removed all textures from Aiko and it ran to completion with no issue. Re-saved the DAZ default Aiko textures and tried again. It got to about 3000 iterations before it hung up.

Check in your log file (Help/Troubleshooting/View Log File) Do you see two repeating lines that say something about preventing/prevented device timeout on scenes that hang up on you? I get them on all renders that fail. Some on renders that finish but an increasing amount of them the longer the render goes on scenes that hang up.

Jimbow

Good point, I'll try that later. Meanwhile, I converted the figures to props and it's getting further than yesterday's 14 iterations (the fans are whirring and all threads are maxxed out. If iray works like Mental Ray then it'll be converting all geometries to poly meshes before rendering, including the displacement, so I see ample opportunities for crashaganzas and oerfect storms in this Beta stage.

Jimbow

So the scene got to iteration 57 and hung. I created a Photoshop action that loaded and resaved every single texture in the scene, and the render still hangs at iteration 57. Screengrab of what happens with the processor attached.

jepegraphics

I too have issues with hung up scenes since the beginning and every time the Graphics Card dropped out after a time and Studio wasn't responsive anymore. It really is annoying to have a good Graphics Card (NVidia GTX 770) and can't use it for final renders. CPU only renders slowly but steady. Let's hope that NVidia will find a solution for this, it can't be that you have to leave out the GCard with Iray only to get a decent sized and good quality render!