iRay renders end prematurely

[AtleOdegaard]

Hello everyone! 

I am having a weird problem with iRay in 3DS Max 2016. 

When I do a render with the built in iRay renderer it will stop after between about 45min to 1:30hrs regardless of the set time. The time before it stops seems to follow the complexity of the scene, so I think it stops after a number of iterations, but I am not sure as the render window disappears. It also happens if I set an iteration count limit. I think it happens around 8-9000 iterations. 

The exact same thing happens if I send it to backburner on another computer. 

There are no error messages when it stops, no crashing or hanging, it just acts as it would when it's done. Except it isn't, and I'm left with noisy unfinished renders. 

At first I thought there was something in the scene I was rendering, but it also happens with scenes I have successfully rendered in the past on the same hardware. 

I even did a clean install on the backburner machine which now has nothing but windows, nvidia drivers and 3ds installed. 

If someone can help me with this I will be so happy 🙂 I have tried everything and then some!

[AtleOdegaard]

Today I installed 2017 and the updated iRay plugin (not iRay+) and tried some renders using my watercooled 1080 card. The same thing happens after about 1 hour and 25 minutes. 

This time I recorded the screen and noticed something interesting: the first 40 minutes the iterations are regular, about 2000 every 10 minutes. (It's a high resolution render)

After that it accellerates rapidly, and by the time it stops it has passed 1.3 million iterations (!) according to the render window. The picture is still noisy though. Usually I left these running for 7 hours with my 780 card. 

The render message window leaves these messages:

SYSTEM: Production renderer is changed to NVIDIA mental ray. Previous messages are cleared.
SYSTEM: Production renderer is changed to NVIDIA iray. Previous messages are cleared.
IRAY 0.30 479 MB warn : RTKernel: please check the input geometry (degenerated/inefficient RT hierarchy)
IRAY 0.22 493 MB warn : RTKernel: please check the input geometry (degenerated/inefficient RT hierarchy)
IRAY 0.41 483 MB warn : RTKernel: please check the input geometry (degenerated/inefficient RT hierarchy)
IRAY 0.34 497 MB warn : RTKernel: please check the input geometry (degenerated/inefficient RT hierarchy)
IRAY 0.41 485 MB warn : RTKernel: please check the input geometry (degenerated/inefficient RT hierarchy)
IRAY 0.34 498 MB warn : RTKernel: please check the input geometry (degenerated/inefficient RT hierarchy)
IRAY 0.40 486 MB warn : RTKernel: please check the input geometry (degenerated/inefficient RT hierarchy)
IRAY 0.35 499 MB warn : RTKernel: please check the input geometry (degenerated/inefficient RT hierarchy)
IRAY 0.40 486 MB warn : RTKernel: please check the input geometry (degenerated/inefficient RT hierarchy)
IRAY 0.36 499 MB warn : RTKernel: please check the input geometry (degenerated/inefficient RT hierarchy)

Anyone...? 

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @AtleOdegaard,

I haven't see this before, but it seems to be an error message in iRay itself.  Are you on MR 3.14?  One thought is that it may be due to a piece of geometry that has a modifier or material on it that's unsupported or corrupted.  (Or a model itself may be corrupted.)  Or, this may be a problem with driver handling with the 1080 card as well, it's hard to say.  Not only do I have no notes on this anywhere in any of my systems, but the NVIDIA forums don't show anything either.  The only results I could find on Google involved DaZ and an unanswered post on CGTalk.  I would ask NVIDIA about what this means on the NVIDIA forums and I can help you find ways to solve it in Max once I/you know more about it.  

Best Regards,

[AtleOdegaard]

Thank you for your answer. 

I just tried some older scenes with similar setup and they went through with no problems, so there must be something with the materials or geometry I have added in my later scenes that are causing hiccups. I will try to remodel them piece by piece and see if I can find the culprit 🙂 

Strangely, removing geometry and rendering until there was nothing left did not help which led me to believe it was not related to my scenes. But like mentioned, an older scene worked just fine so there must be something scene/file/material related. 

[Phillilp_Miller · Accepted solution]

A long render that fails with that error usually means that your scene contains some corrupt geometry. It failed well into the rendering because it took that long for rays to hit it. Corrupt geometry includes things like co-linear triangles and rats nests of vertices not making valid triangles.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Thank you so much @Phillilp_Miller!  That is really helpful and I thank you for taking the time to post that. It's great to see you in the forums!

@AtleOdegaard,

Would you like me to create a private folder for you to upload to so I can investigate it?  Is this a very large scene?  Another option here might be to do test renders with just a few object showing (10-20 at a time) until you narrow down which model is corrupted.  If there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.

Best Regards,

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @AtleOdegaard,

I wanted to follow up here and see if there was any progress on this issue.  Are you in a better place now?

Best Regards,

[AtleOdegaard]

Hello Alfred.DeFlaminis, I apologize for the late response. The response from @Phillilp_Miller seems to be what's going on.
Thanks for the help guys!

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @AtleOdegaard,

Thanks for the udpate! Were you able to find out which part was causing the problem?

Best Regards,

[AtleOdegaard]

Hello Alfred.DeFlaminis,

I haven't had time to look further into this, so there's no progress. 

There's no need to finish this render anymore, so I'll just investigate it further for curiosity's sake later 🙂 

Thanks for all help! 

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Ok no problem @AtleOdegaard, thank you very much for the update.  I totally understand.  Thanks again for keeping me in the loop!

Best Regards,