Problem with rendering as image series
jaebea
Posts: 456
Haven't had a problem until this new version (4.10.0.123). Each frame renders beautifully at 17 minutes. When I choose series, which is how I alway render my animations, the first frame render great then the next one stalls and never reaches the render stage. CPU spikes to 100% and I'm rendering GPU only. I have tested it many times and it stalls everytime at the 2nd frame, no matter what series of frames I render. I am having to render the series one at a time, which is annoying because I want to be able to set it to rendering all night. Any ideas?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Does it do this even with just a simple sphere in the scene?
No it doesn't. Rendered both frames right away.
Did you change textures on anyone or anything after Frame 1? This gets me every time. I put in a figure, run dForce on the clothes or hair, decide I don't like the skin and change it, and it applies the change gradually over a series of frames, and I have to start all over.
Can't say if it bjorks the animation export as I didn't take it that far.
OK, so my guess would be memory related - how about a single nude figure? And if that works try adding hair or clothing, and so on. It's possible that the new version of iray is slightly more demanding on memory (I don't know), or that a system update means you are using more memory, or both.
I've read in the forum if you change the preview viewport to iRay preview you'll avoid a complete reload of the scene for the next image in the series. I think that a problem on reloading the scene for the next render is the problem so you can avoid it that way if you aren't using iRay Preview for the viewport already.
Can't test it for you because I CPU render.
Could it be caused by items that have their Smoothing Update set to constant?
Nothing changes. Like I said before, I haven't had any problems with other versions. I have been working on this animation for quite some time so I have been through lots of versions of DS. I had not rendered in the series using this particular version in the Beta. I just upgraded by main version to that last Beta version and problems occurred in the series. Everything else is fine. I will try rendering a few frames in a different scene to see if it does the same thing. It rendered the ball in two frames right away.
What about rendering frames 1 and 2 manually, then starting the image series with frame 3?
I did some testing tonight. First and second frame of nude G3F, then add hair, then clothing, all rendered quickly. I added a scene with some props and the problem started. First frame rendered in 11:35 and second frame is at 75% rendered 30 minutes later.
@DrNewcenstein: Doesn't matter what frames I render in succession, the second frame misbehaves.
My system is Win 7, i7 2600, GTX 970 4g and 16g ram. It is sufficient to run IRAY but not to my liking. Will be getting a render-monster probably mid-summer.
@Nonesuch00: My resources just can't handle the IRAY Preview on, especially when rendering. I could even get one frame rendered.
Unless others start complaining about this, I think it may be my computer. I guess I will have to stick to rendering my animation one frame at a time, at least for this scene.
This is odd. The memory required by a scene doesn't change between frames since it is decided at loading-time. Render time may of course change depending on what the camera has to render in that particular frame.
You may check the log to see if there's anything odd reported there. For example if iray reverses to CPU in the second frame and why.
Then if the log is clean other things you may try is to optimize the scene and/or the render settings. For example you could turn off Optix that anyway takes extra memory, and set instancing optimiztion to memory if the scene uses instanced geometry. It could also help to wire the monitor to the mobo so you use the i7 for the viewport and leave the gtx completely free for rendering.
If the scene worked fine before 4.10 I guess it can only be memory or drivers. You can try to update to the latest drivers and/or rollback to the previous ones.
@Padone: I will check this tonight. I noticed that when the second frame renders, my CPU meter spikes to 100%. I will also uncheck optix.
Also optimize for memory rather than speed as it's most likely memory is the problem.
It is a known bug that DAZ Studio isn't fully releasing the VRAM in Iray rendering. Regardless of your video cards memory, eventually, it will stop using the card and drop to CPU due to the GPU thinking it is out of memory (even if it reports that it isn't.) Depending on the memory in your card, it might take two renders, three renders.....twenty renders.....but eventually it will stop using the GPU(s). The only way to fully clear it is to close DAZ Studio (at least that we've found.)
We're not sure if it's a DS problem or an Iray problem....but it's been around for a while.
This is true but I believe it's a behaviour rather than a bug. I mean, in my tests that I did some time ago Iray wasn't releasing the workspace, that's technically called a "lazy" memory handling. This means it may cause troubles to others apps using the vram, but not to iray itself. Indeed personally I never experienced an "out of memory" due to this behaviour. I mean I can go on rendering forever if the scene fits my vram.
The only strange behaviour I noticed is it allocates the initial workspace before the frame buffer. So if you are short of vram you can't go for very high resolutions. And the higher the final resolution the more vram it takes anyway. This is because Iray is not tile based so it renders the whole picture as a huge single tile. And of course the bigger the tile the more vram it takes.
EDIT. It is to be said that I usually keep Optix disabled, since it appears to be unstable on my card. I don't know if this makes a difference. Also I usually keep one card for rendering and one card for the viewport. So Iray has full control on the card for rendering. This also may make a difference.
I'm having this same issue. It's annoying.