Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Bit tired of yet another 48hr render yielding yet more memory errors, and wiping the whole deadline in one go!. We will cease using Maxwell professionally until the next version is released.
Its just too unstable for professional use at this time.
.......ps - were any inroads made to the caustics issue by the way?

Bit tired of yet another 48hr render yielding yet more memory errors, and wiping the whole deadline in one go!.

oh i am so sorry for you deflix ... i had the same tragic occurrence two weeks ago - kepp your head up

i really love the lighting in that design

Sorry about your loss deflix,

I see you use the 64 bit windows version. What is your hardware for rendering?

I am asking because I maybe upgrading my hardware and was considering installing on linux and I would be curious to see if it has also these problems under linux 64 bits. I haven't encountered these problems myself yet on Windows XP 64 bits.

It seems that it maybe also wise to check out some biased renderers :-S Not because I want to abandon Maxwell, but just to also have another tool under my belt for getting images out.

Thanks and good luck,

deflix,

I have recently changed my workflow for hires renderings to avoid Multilight as it costs alot of memory.

After adjusting the ML in a decent size render adjust your lights to match the ML you set up and then render without ML. This helps to avoid memory issues and speeds up renderings alot.

Supportive to your post I must say that I have had ALOT of pain using maxwell for my current project and its almost killing me. I wish things would be more stable and intuitive as well.

that's bad news delfix...

if you get these errors like on the image you posted when netrendering(w/wo multilight) i can recommend to do all merging manually.

under some circumstances (hardware/usage) networks can be a big source of errors. this should not happen .. but it does here and there.

merging on a single computer solves these problems.
at least i never had these stripes on single mxi.

i think using a seperate subnet or even a dedicated switch for the nodes is a good thing too.

Hum, it s the same here, a line of stripes of green tilt on a 70 hours renderings on 8 nodes.... we had to flush it in the bin.

RIP

1. Is it a network render?
1a. If so, it may be only a merging problem. The 48 hours were not wasted. You can retrieve and manually merge the mxi's. Open each one up and see if there is a "problem" node. This has happened to me before, but only with horizontal lines, never vertical. What are the RAM amounts on each node? Could it be that only one node may be screwing up the whole process?
1b. If not, what was the RAM usage during rendering? I see you have ML enabled. What was the rendered resolution? If it was not a network render, surely you could have seen the problem occurring and stopped the render.

It's only my opinion and you'll probably get mad reading this, but I think you might have created this problem with your process. There's no reason I can see to end up with a final render of 48 hours that looks like what you posted. If it was a coop network render, you could have screen checked each individual node's output at any time during the render. Then if there was a problem with a node's output, you could have killed it's process so that the mxi generated would not be included in the merging process. If it's a single computer's rendering, then surely you could have seen it having a problem early in the render process.

The only problem scenario without a solution I can think of is if it was a single comp render, that looked great until you hit "stop", then the lines appeared. Or upon opening each mxi of a coop render (on the nodes' hd's) you find that all have the green lines.

I'm truly sorry you are giving up on such a great renderer. I hope that you can find a renderer that suits your needs.

just crop it!
sorry for the outcome.
I've also had a lot of inexplicable problems from time to time, but luckily they never cost me a deadline.

@bubbaloo
one should not need to manually check every render node to see if everything is all right, in my humble opinion...

And now its my turn to miss an other deadline due to a maxwell error...

SSS working perfectly on my workstation, sent it on the farm to render out during the weekend. Now I log into the farm only to find this

farm


workstation


This must be the 4th deadline missed on a major project im working on and will also make me reconsider which render engine will be put to use for the next job!

I have always found a way to get past this when it happens, so I guess it was never a big issue to me. I have never had a rendering with SSS turn bad on me while switching the renderhost.
I love mx but this shit makes me furious. I've been pulling 70 hrs last week, mostly due to these maxwell bugs, crashes and render problems on the farm (without even utilizing co-op)

I can't wait for monday to tell my client they will not be able to present the work to their client. grrr

This has nothing to do with the co-op merging problem like in delflix' case. Its the SSS bug which has been pointed out on the forum for ages now and has NEVER seen a bugfix from NL after advertizing SSS as the great new improved feature in 1.7...

well just did a large sss render over a render farm (ranch) .. no hicups.. strange..

Although I make simple exterior renderings and I never use SSS and displacement because I have a simple quad PC, it is very bad to read this kind of comments...
Let's hope that NL has fixed all these problems...

I tried to salvage this project last night and sent it on the farm again...

The black dots are now gone...but here come pink ones...jesus this is driving me INSANE.



Hervé, I have rendered various shots with SSS on our farm with out a problem.

But that's just the point I'm trying to make.

Using Maxwell professionally and especially in a slim timeframe randomly brings out errors / bugs / traps that make it almost impossible for me to give the client a heads up when they will be able to see final renders.
Everytime I'm 110% sure all I have left is render it out in hi-res on our 16-core farm I suddenly bump into files and textures not being read that worked perfectly before, renders never getting past SL 0.50 for no appearent reason (nope, no error msg in the log), and most recently this terrible SSS bug.

.... maybe Xssing sss material...? no idea...

I'm using one of the StudioHDR Images to Light this Scene btw.

I would upload it somewhere but logically I can't even show the entire rendering to to copyrights and NDA etc

Bubbaloo wrote:1. Is it a network render?
1a. If so, it may be only a merging problem. The 48 hours were not wasted. You can retrieve and manually merge the mxi's. Open each one up and see if there is a "problem" node.

...................................Thanks for your consistent help Bubba! but I was aware of all this anyway to be honest. We did manage to recover from 3 of the 6 nodes, but the process took over 4 hours, and the final file is still too noisy. The files are 6.5gb each and take an age to open, especially the corrupted versions. The point is that for the money (and maxwell is not cheap)..... it is simply too unstable. I have used it now for 3 jobs and have had major issues with each job. This is not normal. Furthermore on one particular thread I had raised an issue relating to caustics and what I felt to be a bug in the software. this created unwanted artifacts even when caustics was turned off, and I sent the model to NL on request. after several follow-ups I had no response at all!?!............ I hope NL take note.

Don't get me wrong I think Maxwell produces some stunning results and is a fantastic system thats fun to use. Its just with such comprehensive marketing, and vigorous licensing of multiple CPU's I'd expect more then BETA levels of reliability.

As for other renderers we have used Vray since its inception anyway - I was just so excited by maxwell when I looked into it a bit and sold the whole concept to my bosses and got them to buy licenses for 3 workstations and our renderfarm. I'm annoyed because despite making NL money, I've had limited support and My boss is not impressed with me at the moment as a result maxwell issues. They're not interested in the details./..