Corona not rendering the entire animation

[ARIEL.g]

Hi guys,
I am new here.
I have to render an animation of a very big scene for my master thesis (12 mln verts round 500mb ) and I am having very strange problems while trying to do that. Everything started when I imported in my scene a mesh of a church façade modeled with rhino.
 
When I start to render the animation, corona is able to render the first frame, but everything crashes or simple freezes while beginning parsing the scene of the second frame.

Before It was even worse, because i couldn't start the rendering process at all: I discovered there was some object in the scene (rooftiles made with A-Tiles plugin) strangely preventing the render from starting, for a reason i still don't understand. The problem seemed solved after eliminating that objects. But anyways, it just renders one frame and simply freezes while trying to render the following one.

I don't think it's a matter of size of the file/number of polygons/verts because I was able to render much larger and heavier scenes with no problems.
What could it be?

I am using 3ds max 2016 with corona 1.3 I use precalculated UHD cache and i render the alpha channel

My pc has INTEL XEON CPU E5-2630 v4 2.20ghz + 2.20ghz (2 processors) and 32 gb RAM

Hope you can help me understand what the problem is.
thank you in advance!

[Frood]

Welcome,

we just had a similar problem this weekend (Corona 1.4 | Max2016 SP3 | Win7). Only 2 of 3 frames of the scene rendered properly and a workmate came upon a non responding Max this morning. He tried to close some windows (cVFB/Render Dialogue) and waited a little bit, Max got responsive again after a while and... started to render frame 3(!). Never seen something like this. I wasn´t aware of his problem and hence could not create a minidump of the unresponsive situation.

Last line in the log was

2016/07/02 02:59:48 INF: [44764] [03348] CORONA : Saving + Cleaning up

It´s a bit scary that Max +|- Corona seem to have got unreliable to some extend: no more fire+forget as it has been for us with v1.1.1. + Max2014 and even during 1.3 dailies (Max2014+Max2016).  At least when using more complex scenes and/or Forest/Laubwerk stuff (which is still most likely the cause of many problems here) there seem to be more unresolved issues besides those already to be found on Mantis.

We will try to reproduce the situation and to get a minidump next time, hopefully this will reveal some hint.

@ARIEL.g:

- Does it render when you delete the problematic facade part? If yes: can you share it?
- Is there any reason why you are still on Corona 1.3? That is: Could you try to render the scene with 1.4?
- Do you use any scatterer or Laubwerk-Plants by any chance?
- Have you tried to hide most objects and unhide them step by step to see what´s the culprit? (You can use very small render sizes for testing and a one or two pass limit, just render your sequence - that´s important of course)


Good Luck

[ARIEL.g]

Hi Frood, thank you for the answer.

Everything renders properly when i try to render the scene eliminating the coulprit object, but if I import this façade +rooftiles on another file, it renders with no problem at all. I am using Corona 1.3 on this pc, but I also tried v. 1.4 on another pc with the same characteristics......NO WAY. Keeps on freezing

I have some plants made with the forest-pack lite, but they're all proxies and I have another scene that is identical to this one, except from this façade modeled with rhino and this A-TILES rooftiles, and it renders perfectly. I always used a-tiles and forest pack plugins, and it's the very first time this issue comes out.

I already tried to import one object at a time, to see which was the problematic one in the entire scene, that is how i found out these rooftiles caused the problem. Even if i render a 256x256p image, nothing happens. It eventually renders the first frame and then stops. Sometimes it doesn't even render the first one. Comepletely random stuff.

I am losing my mind.

I can try to share the scene, even if it's quite confidential.

I will also try to close the render frame buffer. We'll see.....

[maru]

Hard to tell what it is, but I have two suggestions:

1. Updating Windows and installing MSVC++ exactly as instructed here:
https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/12000011862-material-editor-is-very-slow-freezing-in-corona-1-4
While this may sound stupid, this solution sometimes fixed very strange problems, and it's not something hard to do. So might be worth a try...

2. Unchecking "Multithreaded parsing" in devel/experimental rollout. This sometimes solves issues with some plugin incompatibility.

[Frood]

"Random" sounds weird assuming you have no memory shortage.

I can try to share the scene, even if it's quite confidential.

In that case it would be the best to open a support ticket here when you get stuck and Marus suggestions don´t work at all.

https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/new

Good luck!

[ARIEL.g]

Disabling the render window, it seems that it's working much better. It renders more than one frame. I am so happy I achieved this at least. Hope it will last.

If the problem persists i will for sure submit my file to the helpdesk and open the support ticket.

I will also install the windows updates and hope it soves the problem.

In the meantime, thank you a lot for your help, Maru and Frood

[ARIEL.g]

Unfortunately, the problem persist. My file is too big to be uploaded in the support ticket section. Where can I upload it? I saw some of the developers have a private dropbox folder for the big files...

[maru]

Have you tried disabling multithreaded parsing too?

You can compress the files and upload them to Dropbox or Wetransfer and then send us the links over the support portal.

[cecofuli]

Try to disable a layer, then rendering. Disable another layer and rendering again etc...
I'm sure that you have to optimize some geometry.
What about RAM consuming?