Constant crashes. How to workaround crashes ?

[oguzbir]

Hello,
Been working with octane for somepast time. (trying to work I must say).
And I am really trying to put octane in my pipeline.
I have to ask.. Is it only me ? I can never accomplish to finish a scene on one session. All resulting crashes.
I sincerely know that this v5... all are beta but..
I completely love octane the quality it creates. Maybe a autobackup with 3 or more files sequentially would be aweasome to get over with the crashes and loosing content.

For me this is purely not an object related problem. Try to work with different scenes.
Connecting the materials to the obj node kills the hell out of me.
I even disable the material and texture preview icons. I do not try to move or rotate zoom the camera.
Work on directlighting for start and with no HDRI image loaded.
I create my setup in MAX and export it. Just wanna assign my materials.
Not using Live DB materials.

What I am trying to ask is. What are the known issues.
I create material nodes next to the the obj node. Then I try to connect the nodes one by one.
But after some time connecting a simple diffuse material as is - without any texture applied-
Octane crashes.

This is pretty exhausting.. More and more each day I see excellent interior scenes rendered in the gallery.
But please tell me do you have these crashes also and you've absolute patience? and save your WIP every 10 seconds.?

I have 1 GPU GTX 465 with decent drivers. Running the 64 bit version of v5. By the way is 32 bit version more stable ? Does using 1 gpu creates all the problems? Please share your advices.

Thanks,

[matej]

I mostly experience hangups (GUI freezes and the process must be killed), not crashes. That usually happens when working with texture nodes (during render restarts when dragging or linking output to input). While it's definitely annoying, it's not that bad if I save often (like after every major changes).

I have only one GPU and when I build my scene I do it directlighting on a lower resolution (1 megapixel max). This way the workflow is manageable and quite smooth.

[oguzbir]

matej,
Thanks for the response.
Seems like you're running octane with Ubuntu. I guess my issues are different than yours.

Cheers,

[sathe]

I don't have time to go into the list with you now, but hopefully you feel comfort in knowing you are not alone.

[radiance]

What would help is some procedures we can use to reproduce the bugs in question,
otherwise it's difficult to fix them all

If you have any specific procedures, please post them so we can investigate.
We're currently trying to squash as much bugs as possible for the next build, so they are definately welcome.

It's not always easy to find them as people use octane in different ways.

Radiance

[teecee2107]

I create material nodes next to the the obj node. Then I try to connect the nodes one by one.
But after some time connecting a simple diffuse material as is - without any texture applied-
Octane crashes.

I often have this problem too (with a new material node or with a material node from the LiveDb). This is how I avoid it.
I create the new material node (or I drop it from the LiveDB) and, BEFORE CONNECTING IT TO THE OBJ NODE, I double click on it, so I switch on preview mode (you know, with the sample ball ...).
And then, I connect this material node to the obj node. And so on ... FIRST double click on a material node and AFTER, connect it ...

Sorry for my english , I hope you'll understand what i'm triyng to explain and also that this will help you ...

[radiance]

Hey,

We can squash more bugs for the upcoming release, so if anyone can provide a step-by-step procedure to reproduce the crash(es) in question,
we will investigate and fix.

The procedure should be detailed enough to allow us to reproduce the crash.
The given information is a bit vague, i can't seem to reproduce it.

Radiance

[matej]

Concerning the freezes I've been experiencing, it seems that they appear 'randomly' (but in each occasion when a render re-start was triggered), so I haven't been able to pinpoint a reproducible case. But in my experience they happen more often when I have just loaded an image and triggered a render re-start afterwards.

I hope you guys have limited the occasions where render re-start happens, to just those that really change the parameters in the pipeline (now they happen even when browsing the node inspector, or just dragging nodes around). That would probably reduce the possibilities of crashes, hangups or other mischief.

[radiance]

matej,

Are you on a 32 or 64 bit OS when you experience the crashes ?
If someone can provide some procedure (with a test scene if needed/possible) it would definitely make it easier to hunt down the bug(s).

Radiance

[matej]

Are you on a 32 or 64 bit OS when you experience the crashes ?

I'm on Ubuntu 64 bit (that's the only OS I use).

In an old thread I have pointed out that Octane uses a lot of CPU when rendering (more in pathtracing, and more for larger resolutions) - up to all of the available CPU power on heavy scenes. When the freeze happens the CPU usage drops to zero, GUI becomes unresponsive and I need to kill the Octane process manually to release the resources. A thing to note is that it looks like the GPU is still (a little) in use, even if the GUI is frozen - if I don't kill the process the GPU temperature stays at 42C (while in idle is around 25C, and in full load at 70C). Another thing to note is that Octane never crashes (ie. the process just 'hangs up') - but this same problem might result in a crash on Windows machines.

These freezes happen in the render re-start step, when working with nodes, like;

* connecting output to input
* creating a node
* moving nodes around

This is the info that is constant, unfortunately I haven't been able to make out a reproducible step. I'll research this a little more (using the chess scene), and see if I can get a more consistent info, and will report if I find anything new.