[el.mustafa]

Dear All,

This could well be a Maya rather than a Maxwell question but...
Only with Maxwell I notice that whenever I run a batch render from Maya 2011
the render stops after approximately 250 frames (3-5 hours, each frame under 450 kb)
then I need to restart again manually.

Is it some sort of a memory safety limit that causes Maxwell to stop?
If so how can I override it? I have plenty of Gigabytes to make use of so memory is not a concern.

Note I use Mental Ray and Pixar's Renderman as well without similar issues.

Regards
El

[Mihnea Balta]

There is no such limit, but you may have found a bug that causes the plug-in to abort after rendering a number of frames (most likely a memory leak). Do you get any messages or a crash report from Maya when it stops? How many polygons and materials does your scene have, approximatively? Can you reproduce this with a simple scene, or does it only happen in one scene? Can you tell me how much memory Maya is using when it's close to aborting, e.g. after 200 frames? What happens if you try to export all the frames as MXS (file->export, check the "animation" box), does it still abort after around 250 frames?

[el.mustafa]

Thanks for your reply Mihnea,

I'll need to run the tests you mentioned before my reply
and I'm just waiting for my current project to finish rendering first
as it is using most of the CPU resource on my 8-core workstation.

Just to let you know:
Total polygon count =162,858
Materials = 21

I do not get any Maya crash reports, in fact I rarely run the Maya main application
when batch rendering because the user interaction slows down a (tiny) bit. As for memory usage
the Maya and Maxwell applications do not appear to use more than 750 MB at any one point
as they both reset before rendering the following frame.

I also get rid of the MXS files by directing the "persistent MXS" path to an imaginary folder. Don't keep them as
each file costs over 25 MB in space minimum and my project is 1700 frames. Although HD memory is plenty
I still try to not stretch it if I could.

Will write when I've tested a simple scene and the export-to-MXS-first workflow.

Gratefull for your suggestions
El

[Mihnea Balta]

If you don't need the MXS files, why do you enable persistent MXS? If you direct those files to a non-existing folder, the plug-in will try to create that folder and it will abort if it can't. It needs to write them somewhere, because the renderer has to read them to know what to render. If you don't need them, disable persistent MXS and they will be deleted automatically when the renderer finishes.

[el.mustafa]

True

I only resorted to this because the plugin was writing the MXS files out of its own will..
Every other release I get one of these strange behaviours and then it gets resolved with the next release
This release just happens to be one of the funny ones
I saw the return of a bug that I saw when the first update to v2 first came out.
When you create a new polygon object you get all the Maxwell attributes (e.g hidden from camera) to work fine.
Just save the file and open again then the Maxwell attributes vanish.
At least that's just for objects, a few releases ago even the Camera attributes (Maxwell F-stop and others) would go away too.

Technical support could not replicate this strange behaviour so it must be some kind of driver conflict I think.
The good thing is that such quirks usually disappear with new releases

I suggested to Dario that you keep older versions of the plugin for download if possible so we have the option to downgrade
untill new releases come about if we're not happy with the current ones.

Will write again with the test results.