Pixel Plow Render Failed

Started by mrjrdnthms, April 06, 2015, 05:15:43 PM

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mrjrdnthms

I submitted a project for rendering at pixel plow. Project is a bit complicated (15 populations of tens of thousands of objects, high resolution heightfields and image map shaders, 60 frames, 1080p).

The project uploaded fine but then quit just as it started to render. I emailed pixel plow support and they said:
"The reason TG crashed was an access violation;
Application exit Status: -1073741819 (0xC0000005)
We see this with TG occasionally, and there has been no fix suggested from the Planetside devs.  They don't know what causes it.  They have suggested creating population cache files for all of the object populations in a scene.  I see several populations listed in the log file, so that may help.  No further steps should be required to get this scene to render successfully.  We think TG has overlapping file I/O errors on occasion when a bunch of systems go to read in the same set of data simultaneously (like is normal in a render farm), but it only seems to occur with object populations."

All of the populations in my project are cached so I am not sure what to try. The project is about 8gb which takes hours to upload to pixel plow. So trying it over and over again would be a real pain.

Anyone seen anything like this or have any ideas? I've attached a sample render from my machine to give you a sense of the scene I'm rendering.

[attach=1]

Dune

Sorry to see that happen, very frustrating. I can't help you with the problem itself, but I do notice some strange colored trees, you might want to check those out. They are very greyish blue, and it seems they have no leaves, or the translucency and/or reflection is set too high.

Oshyan

We're taking another look at it on our side at Planetside Development HQ. Hopefully we can figure out what's going on. But it does only seem to occur on render farms for some reason... If it's at all possible to share your scene file (without population and GI caches, hopefully cut down the file size), it could help diagnose the problem. You can contact us to arrange transfer at support AT planetside.co.uk.

- Oshyan

midnight_stories

I used pixel plow for the first time it was good till I got the file back.
It was a spherical map render 8192x4096 set to an EXR file.
The image looked fine but the file size was more than double.
I did a comparison one I did myself was 90meg, pixel plow was 256meg
Next I tried out the hdr scene in Daz  studio Irays
My one was good it cast a shadow from the sun and lit the objects.
The pixel plow one didn't  cast any shadows or lit the objects.
So there is a missing step somewhere that makes a big difference.

Oshyan

midnight_stories, from your description I'm assuming this is a single image, which means it would have been split up on Pixel Plow to render across multiple machines. When they deliver you a single image at the end it means they've had to stitch it together on their end. What you're describing sounds like it might indicate an issue in their image stitching algorithms, perhaps specific to EXR and/or higher dynamic range images. It seems quite possible that their stitching algorithm doesn't handle A: 16bit/channel images properly, and/or B: isn't doing compression on the output image.

I would suggest getting in touch with Pixel Plow regarding this issue. You can point them to our reply here for some ideas of what might be going on.

- Oshyan

midnight_stories

#5
Yes I think you're spot on the money there. Will have to make a full report to them.
I was going to try at another place to see if the same thing happened. It was really
more a test to see how it all works.

P.S. Here the difference between the two images

midnight_stories

Well I didn't get much satisfaction I'm afraid they didn't believe me that it was the same scene.
And said I'd turned a light on in my scene. The rendered images I showed here are totally image
based lighting, no lights in the scene what so ever. I ended up going to garageFarm they didn't split
it up and it was rendered on a single machine but I got the same result I rendered myself so, what you
were saying is correct, thanks