hi everyone, im new here and nice to meet you all 
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ive got this problem where im rendering with maya 2011 and mental ray with deadline where the renders take progressively longer to process - attached is an image of the render time graph for a scene. each time the render time goes down is when ive had to suspend the job and do something else on the machine. ive tried rendering the scene straight from maya or via backburner and this doesnt happen (so the render times stay at around 2mins per frame) so im guessing that it might be a deadline specific problem. im running both the repository, monitor and slave from a single machine so dont know if this is part of the problem.
if there is any other information i can provide, please let me know!
That is strange. Does this happen with every scene you render with, or just this one in particular? Regardless, a workaround might be to disable the “Use MayaBatch” option when submitting the job. This will render in command line mode, and while you lose the benefit of keeping the scene in memory between tasks, I would expect it to solve this particular problem.
Cheers,
this happens with every scene i render - which is why i thought its rather strange. ill give the command line renderer a go and see if its any better. thanks!
Can you post a very simple scene that reproduces this problem (ie: a camera and some geometry, but no external textures or references)? We can test this out here to see if we can reproduce.
Thanks!
hey ryan,
i tried rendering with maya command line but the problem still occured… then i found a solution to this problem (i think) - i turned on submit render layers as seperate jobs and the problem is a lot less serious - histograms below:
all these scenes have several render layers and referenced files in them, ill make a file with everything imported and see if the problem still occurs and put it up here either today or tomorrow. thanks for the help !
Hi there,
We are having this same issue at our studio running maya 2010 on deadline 4.1. A task of 5 frames of our scene start our around 2.5 hours, but have gotten upwards of 15 hours. It also seems that slaves are getting to 100% and just sitting there, not transferring the rendered images to the network drive and therefore not picking up a new task.
NEED HELP PLEASE!!
Hi Scott,
Do your scene files also contain layers? If so, have you tried enabling the option to submit each render layer as a separate job to see if that helps?
Cheers,
We tired that, also tired using mayacmd versus maya batch, same issue. Seems to be happening to a scene that uses maya ocean, and has a particle system. The beauty pass alone starts off at 13 minutes per frame, and has been climbing progressively to over 1 hour per frame by frame 400.
Is the scene using a particle cache? If it isn’t, the longer render times could make sense because the particles need to be recalculated from frame 0 for each task that is rendered. If it is using a particle cache, is the cache in a location that’s network accessible? If not, then the slaves won’t be able to find it and will have to recalculate the particles as well.
That being said, I’m surprised using the mayabatch plugin doesn’t workaround this problem, since the maya scene is kept loaded in memory between tasks.
Cheers,
