Hi,
we’ve had troubles with 3dsMax storing black frames for a while. First with Backburner, but now we’ve changed to Deadline and (finally) have access to a good logging system.
We have 32 render blades and often a few of them starts spitting out black frames. I know Deadline can automatically retask these frames, but we are wondering what might be causing it?
They are easy to spot as the rendertime is reported as 2-3 minutes compared to 20-30 mins on the properly rendered frames.
This is what part of the task log file typically looks like:
Usually the jobs starts out ok on every blade, then perhaps midway one or more of the blades starts producing the black frames without reporting any errors. Anyone have any ideas?
Typically this is caused by running out of memory during the Final Gather / indirect illumination stage.
It can sometimes be a beast to fix, but generally speaking, render the job on your best machines with the most RAM installed in them. Infact, buy more RAM if you can! Increase the page file.sys on the render does. Ensure they have lots of hard disc space free. Ensure “Restart Renderer between frames” is enabled to ensure any memory gets flushed between frames being rendered on the same machine. Re-work your memory settings in MR. Hopefully, all together this will get the renders processing better. I have assumed you are already running a x64bit OS and the x64bit edition of 3dsMax.
Thanks for the quick reply!
Yeah, I guess what you mention makes sense… I have been suspecting the RAM, although I was afraid it might be faulty RAM as some of the blades are starting to become a few years old.
Our scenes usually max out the RAM on all blades. The 16 first have 16GB installed and are the ones that fails the most, while the 16 last servers has 18GB installed.
I’ll make sure that everyone submitting jobs has turned on the “restart between frames” option and see if that helps.
Also, try increasing the memory setting in FG/MR from the default 650Mb to 2500 and then 5000Mb if the jobs still continue to fail (< Max2011). This has been known to resolve issues in the past with MR. In the past, I’ve been able to tweak heavy scenes which could only run on 16 or 32GB or more RAM machines to run on 4GB by playing with the memory and FG settings in MR and reducing the sampling levels. “How low can you go” is always a good question to ask your artists on their settings which by default, of course, must be the highest possible as their work is the most important thing ever! LOL!
Alright, thanks for the suggestions! We’ll try them out and hope it solves our problems for now 
And I absolutely know what you mean about the render settings, hehe! I’m working 50/50 as a 3D Artist and Technical Supervisor and I know the battle of getting everyone to lower their render settings (and my own struggle to find the magic middle way settings) 
Do you know, we’ve been having the same sort of problem today. A basic Vray animation that rendered fine yesterday, started to spit out black frames.
We think the answer is that when submitting the job fullscreen (ie 1 viewport maximised) and locking the viewport in the render settings creates the black frames. Unlocking fixes the issue, and when all 4 viewports are viewed locked or unlocked the problem doesn’t arise.
Let me know if this fixes it.
chris.
Yes, locked viewports can cause problems. I’ve usually noticed that it renders from a different view (i.e. top view) when someone has locked the camera view.
So far it looks like ticking Restart Max Between Frames works for us until we get more memory installed