3DSMax 2013/2014 crash on default Scanline renders

[YinkaAlade]

Hi,  we're in the process of setting up a renderfarm and everything is working fine but we couldn't get simple Max renders to work. So we tested max on one of our Render Workers and we noticed Max crashes immedately in 2013 and 2014 with a default scanline render. Now, if we render in mental ray it works fine, but not in defualt scanline render. So this isn't us sending a render to this Worker, this is us just opening Max on the worker and trying to get simple box primitive renders to work. The crash gives us little to no info. The only info I have is from windows which is:

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:    APPCRASH
  Application Name:    3dsmax.exe
  Application Version:    16.0.420.0
  Application Timestamp:    512f962b
  Fault Module Name:    StackHash_100f
  Fault Module Version:    6.2.9200.16579
  Fault Module Timestamp:    51637f77
  Exception Code:    c0000374
  Exception Offset:    PCH_CE_FROM_ntdll+0x0000000000002C2A
  OS Version:    6.2.9200.2.0.0.272.7
  Locale ID:    1033
  Additional Information 1:    100f
  Additional Information 2:    100f8641728fb29db74e9790b6e47f22
  Additional Information 3:    40b8
  Additional Information 4:    40b83ab20fb9821c8f7494b3380ca9a7

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Our workers are setup with

Windows Server 2012 (this is basically Windows 😎

Xeon E5-2660 v2 (40 CPUs)

65536 ram

Matrox G200eR videocard

So we're trying to figure this issue out so we can finally have this farm setup and complete. Any ideas on what is the problem?

[YinkaAlade]

no ideas?

How can I contact Autodesk directly about such an issue? Only support I see are docs and the AREA forums.

[DarrenP]

if your on subscription you can go through the subscription website or through your reseller

[Anonymous]

Never got in contact with them, but the issue is Max has a problem dealing with CPUs having more than 32 cores real or virtual

[spacefrog_]

Yinka:

It does'nt really surprise me that a renderer like Scanline, which has'nt been touched since decades, can't deal with that ammount of cores. Scanline does work great with multiple cores, but maybe there is some hard limit in the code, after which it simply crashes...

To deal with this issue, you have to set the process affinity mask, 3ds Max is using while rendering ( = limiting the cores ). That would best be done via pre-renderscript or render callback, that checks wether scanline is the active renderer, and limits the affinity mask accordingly

Like in this maxscript pseudo code ( note: has not been tested as i don't have that much cores 😉 )

The following script would activate the limit when scanline is detected as renderer, and deactivated when a different renerer is used. To disable right after rendering, it might be better to use a post-render script

But i doubt you'l use more than 32 cores for anything else besides rendering anyways...

-- pre-render script / or callback

function CoreLimiter activate:TRUE=
(
    if( activate == TRUE  ) then 
    (
        sysinfo.processAffinity = 4294967295P        
        -- the above "magic" number has 32 bit set to "1", and each set bit activates 1 Core
        -- all cores above 32 should be disabled now
    )
    else sysinfo.processAffinity = sysinfo.systemAffinity  
)      
if( classof(renderers.current) == Default_Scanline_Renderer ) then 
    CoreLimiter activate:TRUE   
else
    CoreLimiter activate:FALSE  

[Anonymous]

 thanks for the reply! I want to try that out but current our farms were running on trial versions of Max and those ran out a week ago. Here's what's funny..

We're using Qube! as our render wrangler. When I send a Max Batch Render for vRay through Qube it will work perfectly fine. Issue with standard Max Batch Render is Max will crash on image save if the render is bigger than 12,000 x 12,000 pixels. We do posters and such art over here. So sometimes clients want files at like 18,000 x 18,000 pixels! Now, in Qube if you us Max Render with vRay you can render in MAx any size you want. I still have NOT figure out why. All I know is Max Batch Render uses command prompt and Max Render uses Perl Script. So why not just use Max Render you say? Because over 32 cores that doesn't work... lol. Man I can't tell you how annoying this dance and song is.

Turning Hyperthreading off for this sucks because from our tests it's about 25% faster which is a lot! I'm hoping to find a way around the licenses being expired. If it works with your code, that'll be great, but then that code would still have to be somehow intergrate with Qube. The thing is Qube never actually opens up Max which is why it works without it being licensed so I'm not sure the code could even be added.

[spacefrog_]

AFAIK you can pass pre-renderscripts when using commandline rendering, Max does not have be licensed for those to work ( some maxscript commands like scene saving etc. do not work while in headless rendering mode AFAIK)

And the crash with images over 18K*18k should'nt happen either - i just rendered a 24K*24K on my 4 core/8GB machine using scanline with VFB open ( which eats additional memory ) , and even saved that manually out from the VFB. But don't use JPG that will probably crash when saving, PNG worked perfectly. But of course that ate all of my 8GB RAM

[Anonymous]

Okay, I'm not super knowledgable when it comes to running these command line commands. So how would I run your command code in command prompt?


Also, the file format we use was Tif and we were rendering straight vRay and saving the files as Tifs. I haven't tried using Scanline though, but 95% of our renders are vRay. I'll try changing the file format today and see what happens.

Thanks for all the help so far. 🙂

[spacefrog_]

Well - these are technical challenges that cannot be solved online alone. I don't even know how your pipline is set up and how Max is integrated in that. If it's your task to make things work, well than i think you should dig through all the docs available on that matter (it's all there in the 3ds Max docs)...

Here's a link to the docs about commandline rendering switches, and yes - pre-render/postrender scripts are available, so i was right

http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/files/GUID-E5239450-557C-4F51-8DBE-B9BE22F881CA....