C4DtoA keeps crashing upon render, but weirdly only on second frame

Question

question

Bernd Meyer asked · Jun 02, 2020 at 10:51 AM

C4DtoA keeps crashing upon render, but weirdly only on second frame

Hello,

I have tried to solve this problem for the last day, but was not able to find the source of the issue. Usually all scenes render quite flawlessly with Arnold for me, but this one I just can't get to work.

The render process starts without problems, but always crashes on the second frame, no matter what frame is the first one. A day ago for some reason it managed to render about 50 frames without crashing, but I could not reproduce this effect.

I have attached the bugreport. I would be really glad if someone from the team could look into it quickly, I am at the end of my wisdom here, but I feel like I might be missing something obvious.

_BugReport.txt

c4dtoa crashing

-bugreport.txt (423.4 KiB)

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Answer 1 · 2020-06-04T20:36:30Z

Bernd Meyer answered · Jun 04, 2020 at 08:36 PM

I did another run on the original scene with the problem and deactivating the auto tx function is removing the crashes. I think the issue was a specific texture in the scene, I first suspected an animated bitmap shader (a TV that was playing back an image sequence) to be the culprit, but deleting it didn't solve the problem, so it was maybe another texture, I'm not entirely sure. Maybe it was a file where a .tx already existed, but wasn't marked in the TX manager and there was maybe a problem with permissions during tx creation or something like that, something external to Arnold or the tx maker. But I'm really just guessing here

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Peter Horvath · Jun 08, 2020 at 08:01 AM

Thanks for the feedback. Oddly the log does not suggest any problem with the tx generation. My guess is it's somehow related to the large number of textures used in the scene. I'll investigate.

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Answer 2 · 2020-06-03T12:34:52Z

Bernd Meyer answered · Jun 03, 2020 at 12:34 PM

So I was able to solve the prolem by unchecking the "auto convert textures to TX" checkbox in the Arnold texture settings. I don't know why exactly this helped, but renders are about 30% faster now and no crashing at least for the last 20 frames so far

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Peter Horvath · Jun 03, 2020 at 02:06 PM

Hmm, that sounds interesting. If that really solves the issue, please let me know and I'll investigate how tx generation could affect the render.

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Bernd Meyer Peter Horvath · Jun 03, 2020 at 02:08 PM

At the moment Arnold is rendering frame 143 without crashing, so I think this scene works fine now. After it's finished I will try to render the broken scene with the auto-TX turned off and see if it helps there as well. I will let you know

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Answer 3 · 2020-06-03T10:51:35Z

Bernd Meyer answered · Jun 03, 2020 at 10:51 AM

So I think I MAY have found the problem:

I had two scenes merged together and both where rooms that shared the same wall. So upon importing one into the other I had the same wall in place exactly on top of each other twice. I think that was what was causing the issue, I am not entirely sure though - do you think this could have been the reason for the weird behaviour or should this not be a problem?

Both had displacement and an arnold tag applied to them and both were Boolean operations. (For the cut out door)

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Bernd Meyer · Jun 03, 2020 at 10:53 AM

And I know that Arnold has a bit of an issue with booleans within C4D right? For example, often a boolean just disappears in the render, especially if nested.

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Bernd Meyer · Jun 03, 2020 at 11:05 AM

Ok nevermind, it's still crashing...

What is so strange about this is that there doesn't seem to be any pattern to it, sometimes after I delete something it runs for 5 frames, then crashes and the next time I start the same scene it already crashes after one frame again. I cannot get my head around this

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Peter Horvath · Jun 03, 2020 at 11:19 AM

Yeah, I don't think having both meshes should be a problem.

Honestly, at the moment I have no idea what could be wrong and it's really difficult to troubleshoot. You can try to disable elements (like ignore textures, etc.) in the Feature Overrides of the render settings, maybe it can narrow it down.

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Bernd Meyer Peter Horvath · Jun 03, 2020 at 11:27 AM

Okay I will try that thanks !

There was a second boolean walll that I missed that was also sharing the same space with another boole. I deleted it too - I don't know if this time it will work, but at least so far it has been running for 6 frames normally.

And the first scene rendered 400 frames overnight without error, but this was the one were I just deleted a lot of stuff and don't exactly know which one was the cause. But it's definitely something physical within the scene

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Answer 4 · 2020-06-02T19:01:33Z

Bernd Meyer answered · Jun 02, 2020 at 07:01 PM

Thank you very much for the script, the first frame hasn't even crashed once, I think theoretically that should solve the problem, I will try it out.

Yes that also strikes me as very odd, I have already troubleshot a lot of different problems, but in most cases the render didn't even start or the log showed (more or less) a clear identification of the problem source. I have not the slightest idea what may cause this one, especially since both sets that were merged here worked perfectly fine on their own before.

I have spent the last hours deleting objects that are not directly visible to the camera in that shot, at the moment it is rendering frame 7 in a row, so chances are the culprit is one of the deleted objects, but they were so many that I couldn't nail it down exactly. Doing this for every new camera angle would not be very efficient though, so I think for now I will hope that the script will be of help.

Thank you very much for your help Peter, it is greatly appreciated!

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Answer 5 · 2020-06-02T13:06:08Z

Peter Horvath answered · Jun 02, 2020 at 01:06 PM

Can you try increasing the texture cache size and/or max open files in the render settings to see if it makes any difference?

https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFCUG/Textures+-+settings

Try for instance 4096 MB for the cache.

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Peter Horvath · Jun 02, 2020 at 06:06 PM

Not sure what's going on. When the plugin renders a sequence, each frame is independent, each frame starts and closes an Arnold session. So in theory it should be the same as rendering them one-by-one.

I wonder if you have the same crash when you start the render via the Render Queue or Commandline.

Here's a small script which you can also check. It renders each frame as a separate job. Downside of the script is that it blocks the UI and you see only the final images in the Picture Viewer, not the progress.

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render-frame-by-frame.zip (697 B)

Bernd Meyer Peter Horvath · Jun 02, 2020 at 09:11 PM

Unfortunately the script is still giving me crashes..

I had set up my preview range to the frames I wanted to render and set my render settings to preview range. Then I ran the script. Is that set up correctly?

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Peter Horvath Peter Horvath · Jun 03, 2020 at 09:26 AM

Here's an updated script which can read the range from the render settings, so this should work with your setup.

render_frame_by_frame_v02.zip

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render-frame-by-frame-v02.zip (778 B)

Bernd Meyer Peter Horvath · Jun 03, 2020 at 10:48 AM

Thanks! I will try this one

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Bernd Meyer · Jun 02, 2020 at 04:32 PM

I just tried it and it does not help unfortunately, I increased the texture cache to 20000 and the open files to 100 but it still crashes -

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Answer 6 · 2020-06-02T12:25:01Z

Bernd Meyer answered · Jun 02, 2020 at 12:25 PM

So here are the 0229 frame rendered fine and the 0230 frame crashed:

arnoldlog0229Fine.txt

arnoldlog0230Crash.txt

arnoldlog0229fine.txt (411.3 KiB)

arnoldlog0230crash.txt (226.1 KiB)

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Answer 7 · 2020-06-02T11:56:47Z

Bernd Meyer answered · Jun 02, 2020 at 11:56 AM

I have converted the arnold logs to .txt because it would't let me upload the original files

I have attached the first frame (which rendered fine) and the second frame (which crashed). I hope this is more insightful

arnoldlog0228.txt

arnoldlog0229.txt

arnoldlog0228.txt (406.0 KiB)

arnoldlog0229.txt (165.9 KiB)

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Peter Horvath · Jun 02, 2020 at 12:14 PM

So to clarify. If you now run the render from frame229 (which crashed above), then it will render fine and frame230 will crash? Can you send the log of frame229 when it rendered successfully?

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Bernd Meyer Peter Horvath · Jun 02, 2020 at 12:16 PM

No, frame 0228 (which is also attached above) renders fine and 0229 crashes. But no matter which one is the first, the second one always crashes, also if it's 0100 and 0101

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Bernd Meyer Bernd Meyer · Jun 02, 2020 at 12:16 PM

Oh sorry, I misread your text. Yes I will attach a file for you

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Answer 8 · 2020-06-02T11:32:00Z

Bernd Meyer answered · Jun 02, 2020 at 11:32 AM

thank you very much for looking into it.

Unfortunately I am not able to send off the scene..

Yes, I did have motion blur enabled- I just did a run without motion blur and it crashed again...

I also disabled DOF. After that the render rendered for about 4 frames and crashed then.

Otherwise I use almost the exact same setup as in a scene before that rendered just fine. I am using motion clips in this one, a focus object and constraints, that's basically the only difference

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Peter Horvath · Jun 02, 2020 at 11:40 AM

Would be great if you could narrow it down to something specific in the scene. Btw, is there anything (errors or warnings) in the Arnold log? You can find instructions of how to generate full verbosity log files on the right.

Otherwise please contact support and I can send you a build with more detailed debug logs, which can hopefully give me a clue what's going on.

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Answer 9 · 2020-06-02T11:04:36Z

Peter Horvath answered · Jun 02, 2020 at 11:04 AM

Hard to tell from this. Would it be possible to send us the scene (you can contact support(at)arnoldrenderer(dot)com)? Do you have motion blur enabled? Anything special in the scene?

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