By Nigel Hendrickson (24.168.21.68) on Saturday, June 02, 2001 - 06:52 pm:

I've read the various posts concerning the many issues Lightwave has with rendering, textures, file formats and whatnot, but I can't find any that match my particular situation, which is this:

I have a character animation project that is not particularly large in terms of objects (150, 107570 polygons), or textures (146 textures, about 37mb of pict files). Yet every time I open the file and try to render a frame, Lightwave will either hang (prompting a 'force quit'), quit, or freeze the machine entirely (533mhz DP G4, 1.12GB Ram). This will happen a few times before it finally decides to render a frame (without me changing anything). The first time it actually renders, there is invariably some rendering anomaly (missing textures, half an alpha channel, or whatever). I will then restart Lightwave, try again, and finally it will render just fine - again without me having to adjust any parameters whatsoever. All subsequent renders will be OK, until the next day when the whole process begins again. Rendering smaller scenes are usually not a problem at all.

What could possibly be causing this? if it was a texture/ram problem, or an alpha channel problem, why would it eventually decide to render the image correctly anyway? If my system configuration and scene setup are capable of eventually giving me the result I want, why doesn't it happen right from the beginning? Why only on the 4th or 5th attempt?

Any ideas?

- Nigel

By toby (209.239.207.160) on Sunday, June 03, 2001 - 03:15 am:

37 mb sounds like a ton of textures, are they 256 grays? Try giving LW a Gig a' ram

By david lubell (Dlubell) (12.96.176.34) on Sunday, June 03, 2001 - 05:47 am:

try deleting the quicktime loader in the edit plug ins panel/aniamtion I/O..and then only one thread renders..i found that image seuences as texture maps caused a freeze on render..removing qtime loader fixed the problem but i can only render in 1 thread..dp g4 500 os 9.0.4
good luck
dl
http://dlubellanimation.50megs.com/

By Nigel Hendrickson (24.168.21.68) on Sunday, June 03, 2001 - 10:40 am:

When I check 'About this Macintosh' during rendering, Lightwave doesn't appear to be using all of the 850+MB I've alloted to it, so I'd kind of ruled that out, but I gave 1GB a shot anyway and it still freezes.

All of the textures are as efficient as they can be - 8 bit grey scale, 24 bit color or 32 bit w/alpha. I removed the quicktime loader from the animation I/O directory, but it didn't make a difference.

The fact that it does eventually work is what confuses me. It doesn't seem to point to any specific cause.

By hales (66.31.207.27) on Sunday, June 03, 2001 - 11:08 am:

I've noticed this bug as well. Whe my scenes get to a certain polyginal /texture count, the textures start to vanish. I've tried all of the workarounds that others on this board have suggested & nothing seems to work. Brad Peebler from Newtek was nice enough to try & help me out with this issue. I'm going to be sending him a "problem" file of mine so he can try to see what's going on with it. I'll let you know how things pan out.

By Steff (195.46.247.112) on Sunday, June 03, 2001 - 11:58 pm:

hi there, (can I ....Hales ?....)

.....Toby, 37 mb is not a lot..... I have 3 apples and one chinese vase with 26.8 mb.....

So far I can tell you what happened to me with 32 bit images..... cause if I save any picture in Targa format with32 bit (w / alpha channel), LW crashes and I cannot render..... If you need an alpha channel, maybe try to make it a seperate 8 bit image....

By toby (209.239.207.221) on Monday, June 04, 2001 - 02:44 am:

oh

By nigel Hendrickson (24.168.21.68) on Monday, June 04, 2001 - 07:08 am:

Thanks, Hales. Definately let us know how that turns out.

Alpha channels don't seem to be my problem either, since I evetually get exactly what I want after a few (too many) re-starts. What I need to know is why I'm forced to jump through so many hoops to get to that point. I just don't have the time for that.

By Steff (195.46.251.110) on Tuesday, June 05, 2001 - 12:55 am:

Did I said something stupid ???

By Nigel Hendrickson (24.168.21.68) on Tuesday, June 05, 2001 - 08:38 am:

Not as far as I know, and i didn't mean to imply that you did. I was just wondering why Lightwave makes me re-start again and again before finally working properly - when there's no (apparent) reason why it couldn't just do so in the first place.

By Steff (195.46.253.149) on Tuesday, June 05, 2001 - 11:37 pm:

Same for me, 3 days ago LW made me restart about 5 times for blackout menus (thought that was gone ?) , I didn't change anything since then, but now it is working fine, ....hum... dont know...

By Nigel Hendrickson (24.168.21.68) on Thursday, June 07, 2001 - 07:37 am:

I've found a partial fix (well, workaround) for the problem. Now, every morning (if I plan on rendering anything), I trash Layout's preferences file. Then I spend a few minutes restoring Layout's configuration the way I like it, setting the plugins and contents folders etc. It's a pain in the ass, but the results are that it renders without crashing or hanging the first time every time (knock wood). It may still drop textures on occasion, but as I said, it is a - partial - fix. :-)

Of course, this is far from over as the current state of affairs demands that I babysit every render. Batch rendering is, if not impossible, then EXTREMELY unreliable, and I shudder to think of the nightmares that await me when I take a stab at multipass network rendering on this project.

Pray for me.

- Nigel

By Nigel Hendrickson (24.168.21.68) on Thursday, June 07, 2001 - 09:14 am:

Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!

As soon as I open my mouth I jinx it! OK, for the first time in 3 days, this technique has also failed - though it still works more often than not (dammit, there I go again!).

Ignore the previous post except for an 'if all else fails' situation. :-(

- Nigel

By nigel Hendrickson (24.168.21.68) on Thursday, June 07, 2001 - 02:17 pm:

OK, ok. Forget I said anything. The preference file makes no difference whatsoever. It's still 100% hit or miss.

Back to the drawing board.

- Nigel