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Support => Terragen Support => Topic started by: digitalis99 on November 23, 2011, 11:43:39 AM

Title: "An unknown error occurred in TraceRay"
Post by: digitalis99 on November 23, 2011, 11:43:39 AM
I'm new to TG2 and am working on my first project using it.  I have an animation that I'm manually dividing between several nodes to render.  My day job is as an IT guy, so I have LOT's of really decent server hardware to work with.  All of my nodes in the farm are 64bit except one.

On the 32bit machine, I get a LOT of errors when trying to render anything.  For example:
[attach=#]

Each frame that node renders is corrupt.  I created the project on a 64bit node, so maybe that's an issue?  What all do you folks typically ask for to begin troubleshooting this?
Title: Re: "An unknown error occurred in TraceRay"
Post by: Tangled-Universe on November 23, 2011, 12:08:10 PM
Welcome to the forums!

Quote from: digitalis99 on November 23, 2011, 11:43:39 AM
... What all do you folks typically ask for to begin troubleshooting this?

Ghehe, well first of all if you used the search ;D

Searching for the error message in this forums gives you the solution: RAM-usage, or better said: your rendernode is short on available RAM.
As you may know your 32-bit TG2 rendernode can access max. 3.x GB of RAM for rendering, while the 64-bit TG2 rendernodes have access to much much more.
It's likely your 32-bit rendernode is running out of memory and it gives these typical errors.

Cheers,
Martin

Title: Re: "An unknown error occurred in TraceRay"
Post by: digitalis99 on November 23, 2011, 12:19:13 PM
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on November 23, 2011, 12:08:10 PM
Welcome to the forums!

...

Ghehe, well first of all if you used the search ;D

...

Thanks!  The good news is that I *did* search first.  I saw the memory problem listed as a possible cause, so I watched Task Manager during render operations.  The machine has 4GB of physical memory, of which Terragen was using ~1.5GB during the render.  All the other nodes were using similar amounts of memory.  I didn't think memory exhaustion was the issue, so I posted.
Title: Re: "An unknown error occurred in TraceRay"
Post by: digitalis99 on November 23, 2011, 12:33:24 PM
Question: Would there be any part of the rendering process where memory usage would spike on a temporary basis?  I'm wondering if TG needed more than 1.5GB of memory at some point and Windows denied it due to hitting the 2GB user-space limit.  I didn't have /3GB in the boot.ini file on this machine, so I added that and rebooted.  I've started the render again on this node and will report the results.  So far, TG is only using <1.2GB of memory.
Title: Re: "An unknown error occurred in TraceRay"
Post by: Matt on November 23, 2011, 03:54:54 PM
Yes. One of the errors you got is "Unable to allocate memory for subdiv cache." The subdiv cache is dynamically allocate during the render, unless you check "preallocated subdiv cache". You can set the maximum size of this cache on the render settings node (Advanced tab on the render node). If you set the project up on a 64-bit machine with lots of cores, it probably defaulted the subdiv cache size to quite a large number. On your 32-bit machine I would make sure it's set to no larger than 1000 Mb, considering you're already seeing usage up to 1.5 Gb. Hopefully when you saw 1.5 Gb it was already using some of the cache. If not, I'm afraid you might need to bring the cache size down below 500 Mb. It might hurt performance though.
Title: Re: "An unknown error occurred in TraceRay"
Post by: digitalis99 on November 23, 2011, 04:10:50 PM
Awesome, thanks!  Since adding the /3GB switch, the TG process has allocated up to 1.9GB of memory.  I'm assuming that coupled with the other user-space processes that Windows itself launches, TG probably pushed it over the default 2GB limit.  I may end up just pulling this node out of the farm, since it's already the black sheep.   ;)
Title: Re: "An unknown error occurred in TraceRay"
Post by: DannyG on December 05, 2011, 01:08:27 PM
I am getting the same error message, as well as some bucket lines in the image, After reading above ram isn't my problem I have 8gigs and I am running 64 bit quad w/ a nvidia G105m (512mb). I have tried varying types of bucket and cache sizes, still the same issue.
Title: Re: "An unknown error occurred in TraceRay"
Post by: DannyG on December 05, 2011, 01:22:37 PM
Disregard I preallocated to 2000mb no errors and a clean render