Rendering locks up Daz Studio
I've installed Daz Studio on a 2008 Mac Pro. It works find until I render. Some still will work, but rendering movies locks up the program. I get the old beachball, then see in the Force Quit box that Daz Studio is not responding and have to force-quit the program. Any ideas on why this would happen?
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hello,
How much RAM do you have, and what render settings are you using?
I guess you are running OS X 10.6.8 in that one. (I have one here but no DAZ Studio on that one so I cannot test)
I think Totte's on the right track. I had similar problems years ago with an old version of Poser. Every time I tried to render it would lock up/freeze. I realized, however, it wasn't the old Poser 5 that was doing it, it was my old Windows 98SE. I didn't have enough RAM or CPU power to handle any renders with several items/characters in it.
If you can add RAM to the Mac Pro, in the long run you can't go wrong by doing so.
There are 10 Gigs of Ram and it's a fairly simple render of a running figure...a 30 second run cycle. I even turned off motion blur and the hair shadows to make it simpler...still locks up. I am using some genesis clothes on a "sam" figure, would that confuse things?
I have the latest MAC OS on the machine and am trying to dedicate it just to Daz Studio. So the OS and App are on the main drive and the content is on a secondary 1TB drive.
The main problem is that that machine had special RAM DIMMS with thermal controllers on and before everyone else decided to use that so they are more expensive,16GB is around $400.
What render settings? Shading rate, Max Trace depth? Are you rendering using 3Delight or OpenGL?
Btw I checked, the 2008 is not that bad (the 2006 I have here is the one with really special DIMMS).
I'm a newbie at the rendering stuff, so I'm just doing highest qualtiy (turtle!) and the standard 3Delight. The frames are 1280 x 720
It must be something to do with that particular shot/character. I'm testing another shot in a different project and it seems to render fine.
The hinky character has some poke-through between a jacket and the Sam body beneath. Does that sort of thing cause a lock up?
If you check with activity monitor, how much RAM does DS use when it locks up, and did you render to disk, did it even create a .mov file?
Absolutely not, it just makes the result look bad ;-)
But it can be lights for example, an UE2 with very hight settings can use a lot of RAM, specially if you have reflections or transparency maps (like hair or trees with leaves)
Thanks for the help. I'm not using uber lights. just a daylight and a distant light fill. Not familiar with how to read the activity monitor, but it says daz is using 100% of the cpu as it renders. 1.34 gb of memory. There is an item highlighted in red: QTKitServer-(867) DazStudio (Not Responding). So that file may be the culprit.
Which version of DAZ Studio are you using and which model (32bit or 64 bit)
I guess QTKitServer has to do with handling QuickTime movies. I did a short movie render before and had no problems.
This is weird, I need to check further if someone knows.
Ummm...poke through can cause an immense slowdown...IF smoothing is on, especially at a high number of iterations/collision iterations or active update. And if it is trying to calculate animation AND smoothing it can get really slow.
How long did you let it sit before deciding it 'locked up'?
Check the clothing to see if smoothing is enabled and if so, how much.
You could also try rendering to frames, instead of to a mov file.
You're right, animation, forgot that. Then there is another "killer". Check if interactive update is check on any clothing that has smoothing, uncheck that (it brings everything to stall, at least on Mac OS X).
I turned off the jacket that was poking through and am trying a render without it. It is rendering, but taking forever. Interesting to have the Activity Monitor on as it renders: every so often DazStudio (I downloaded the latest version last week) will "not respond" and the QTKitServer is always (not responding). I find it hard to believe this particular shot is so complex that is takes now 20 minutes to render 4 frames. I got this used Mac Tower with the hope it would render faster than my 2010 Imac.
Not responding really means "not accenting user Events" and the QTServer is AFAIK a bridge between Apple 32bit QuickTime and 64 bit Code in DS.
I have a MacPro 2009 Dual 3GHz Quad Core and compared it with my Mac Book Pro 2010 Dual 2.7 GHz Core i7m, the Mac Pro renders 15 times faster.
Sometimes, changing a jacket's collision object will eliminate the poke through without having to up the smoothing. In fact, often, it can even be lowered. If you change it to the item directly under it (shirt/dress/etc).
The main problem is that that machine had special RAM DIMMS with thermal controllers on and before everyone else decided to use that so they are more expensive,16GB is around $400.
I know nothing about the makeup of Macs. I only used one a few times years ago, so never really got to know them at all.
Yeah, in Linux, I often see things that would make one think something is locked up...but if you get to a detailed view of what it is supposed to be doing, you can see 'waiting for to finish', 'disk sleep' (basically means it's been shuffled off to the swap file) or other more helpful hints than the typical 'not responding' messages of the other two major OSs...with Apple's being somewhat more informative than that one from Washington...that's why I asked how long have you waited...
Turning smoothing off was the trick. Turned that off for all garments and now it's rendering like nobody's business. Thanks for the help.
What purpose does smoothing serve and when is it typically used?
To prevent poke through/give a nice fit...but, especially, with animation, if there is too much of it, it won't finish calculating before the renderer starts rendering the scene and you'll get poke through anyway, or an incredibly slow render, while the renderer pauses to wait for the smoothing to finish calculating.
Note that this isn't strictly speaking a quality setting, it very roughly balances quality against speed by selecting whether you render using 3Delight or some portion of your computer's graphics card capabilities. The actual quality settings are below that in the Advanced tab of the Render Settings dialog. Actual "highest quality" settings require some tweaking of the Advanced values, since the defaults are not set to high quality. It's still a balancing act, though, as turning up the quality turns down the render speed, sometimes drastically. This is why D|S animations, even short ones like you're doing, are frequently left to run overnight or longer.