Geometry not loading on at render time - Black frames again

[ChrisPettit]

Hi, I posted about this a while back, where I was getting nothing but black frames at render time. At the time I assumed it was either the limitations of polygon count or VRAM. Made some adjustment to the scene and it just started working so I moved on.

But here I am again with a scene with a lot of cloned instances of geometry, where when I add a new instance that includes a lot more geometry, Octane suddenly just looses its mind and takes minutes to load the geometry, then appears to give up, stop attempting and return a black frame.

I checked polygon count, its less than a million. I rendering on a Titan Z with 12GB Vram. I'm doing everything I can to use instances instead of duplicative geometry. But there seems to be a limit where it just stop working

Any ideas anyone? This is one of a couple of issues that makes Octane risky to work with under deadline pressure.

Thanks in advance

[aoktar]

just you need to check free vram and triangle counts. Max allowed triangle count is about 19 millions. Can you post octane log output from Console window? It's first thing that you should check on errors.

[ChrisPettit]

Thanks for your input, here is the log file

[aoktar]

Find this section in log. See first 3 times for preparation part. Most biggest time spent on object collect and mesh creation. This means that there is lot of objects(propably crazy amount, because i never saw so long collect times) and it's strangely longer than mesh creation time.
Did you see this post? It explain a common pitfall about geometries for viewport vs. final render.
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=53203

[ChrisPettit]

Thanks. I read that post, seems similar, but I'm not even trying to get this to load in the LV.

Strange issue. A lot of times my geometry is coming from other modelers and sources, so hard to control things like triangles and other modeling workflow issues. It's a series limitation for Octane of the geometry that renders fine in Advanced renderer breaks Octane.

But I dont think there's anything that crazy about the individual models in this scene (sample render with Half the objects in it attached). the problem is simply that there appears to be a upper limit to how many of the objects can be in the scene before Octane stops working. So this render was no problem, less than 2 minutes to load and render. But take 1 additional instance of the exact same geometry (well below the max polygon count and below VRam limits) and Octane just stops working.

Very strange, and very scary issue. I've gone to almost all my projects being created and rendered in Octane, but with deadlines looming I continue to wonder how far I can push Octane before it stops working.

Thanks, if anything else occurs to anyone, would love the help. In the meantime I'm trying to work around the problem with cut shots

[aoktar]

2 minutes for sending scene is too much. That means lot of geometry is created and sent.
Don't you use "Render instances"? If so use it. Otherwise renderer will create new copies of objects for each instance in GPU.
Also these limits and startup slowness are not mine. All come from The Renderer and i'm trying to explain and show how you can fix it. Also V3 has not anymore triangle limits. But it's still Alpha.

1-Use LV always before final render.
2-Check triangle counts.
3-Use render instances.
4-Don't use high subdivisions for Picture Viewer Renders, stay low as much as possible.

[ChrisPettit]

Yes, aware of it being a limitation with Octane overall. The other threads where others have mentioned similar issues have come from other host applications.

You mean the "render instance" option in Mograph Cloner object? I have not tried that, thanks for the tip. If it helps I'll post for others benefit

Thanks again for all you input

[ChrisPettit]

THAT WAS IT!!!!!

All of my cloners were NOT set to "render instance". Once I changed this, it fixed the problem, at least for this scene. Although confused, why didn't Octane give me a VRam memory error indication?

But either way, lesson learned. Use "render instance"

Thanks again for all your input Aoktar