Hello, I’m having quite a problem with a shot I’m trying to render out. I have a shot that is about 330 frames long. The objects in my scene are mostly flat planes which have children’s drawing applied to them as textures. Everything looks great, but I seem to be having a problem when rendering the animation and it appears to be completely random.
Three of these flat planes have video on them. Their videos each last for 30 seconds. Their start frames and duration have been set properly in the the textures window. Now when I render the animation, everything typically starts just fine. However, after a period of time, these three objects simply dissapear in the render. This doesn’t occur at any specific frame, and when I re-render it’s okay. However, I can’t afford the time to babysit 330 frames for this shot, or for the 100s of other shots I have to output by the end of June. What could cause this seemingly random “forgetting” of these objects (or their textures???).
2 notes that might help:
All of these video textured objects are on their own layer in my workspace (Same rendering layer though). However, there is no keyframes or actions applied to any of these objects.
This problem seems to happen less if I’m actively working at the computer during render time - whether it be in another program, or in another blender app. Could there be some sort of “idle” state causing this grief?
Anyway, I do hope that’s clear. Thanks in advance to any helpful suggestions which come from this.
My problem is now persisting in other ways. It seems too now that the video clips applied to the planes jump frames every so often at random too. What is going on!?
if its video textured objects that are giving you grief, my bet is that there are some bugs in blender’s handling of of video textures, where its either failing to load a frame, or grabbing an incorrect frame from a video sequence. not sure what the solution would be in that case.
however i have also had some issues with objects disappearing randomly when rendering sequences, and in my case it had to do with group instance duplicates. are you using blender 2.5? i was able to solve my issue by fidding with settings in the performance section of the render panel. in particular i tried different acceleration structures, and unchecking instances. i’m still thinking your issue might be different, but its worth a shot…
Thanks shteeve for the suggestions. One idea just came to me which I’ll try first, but if I have no success I’ll look into these settings you mentioned. Now for me, my video textured objects are not duplicates of other objects, so I’m unsure if the settings you mentioned apply or not??? It’s worth checking into though.
Here’s what I am currently trying. As I was saying, the problem seems more pronounced and occurs more often when I am not actively working at my computer. This whole project I have been doing off an external firewire 800 drive, but the drive does go to sleep when idle. Perhaps it is going idle on me while rendering when I am away, and the video textures are not being made properly available to blender during this time. Other shots in my movie involve characters with fur and plenty of other fun stuff which makes my renders take a long time - However, I’ve not had any problems rendering these other sort of shots overnight. Perhaps this is because all of this data is in the blend file itself. This is the first time I’ve been rendering one of my shots with the plane objects and a video texture, but seeing as blender does not allow movie textures to be packed into the blend file, it leads me to believe that this hard drive issue could be the culprit.
Anyway, I’ve now moved all of my video files for the textures onto my local hard drive and am giving this another shot. I’ll be sure to post my results.
I believe there is a bug in what you’re experiencing somewhere, but I haven’t been able to isolate it myself.
I’m on OS X, 2.56, and have had similar experiences. I’ve tried lots of ways to prevent it from happening, and finally found a solution: I installed a free app called “Jiggler” from Stick Software. When you are away from your computer, Jiggler moves your mouse cursor a little bit every few minutes, which keeps your computer awake. Since I started using Jiggler (about 3 days ago) I haven’t had a single instance of the problem coming back.
I’m not sure if that makes it an OS issue, or a python issue, or a blender issue, or what. If you do try Jiggler or a similar program (there seem to be a number of them out there), please let us know if it worked.
Incidentally, when rendering I adjust my power setting so the computer and drives are always on, but that didn’t seem to help.
benu! Thank you so much for this idea. I’m in the voice recording studio today, but I am eager to get back to the office this afternoon to give this a try. I’m very optimistic that your idea will work. I too am on OS X, 2.56 so this does seem like a likely solution. Similar to you, I set my system preferences to never put the computer to sleep and set the drives to always be on. This did not work last night, similar to your experience too. On my drive to the studio today I was just thinking that there must be a piece of software out there which simulates a user at the machine. This “Jiggler” may just be the answer. I will give this a go tonight and report back.
From what I’ve read here, I think you are on the right track as far as the external hd going to sleep, however the jiggler idea might not work. My thinking is the drive is going to sleep, but yet it should be accessed everytime blender needs to fetch the next frame, so why is it going to sleep if blender is accessing it? Not sure here, but my thinking is if blender is accessing the drive and it goes to sleep while rendering would the jiggler keep it awake? I think I would copy the files from the external hd to the folder where the project is stored on the internal hd (assuming that is where the project files are saved at)…
That did it! Thank you again benu so much for the tip on the “Jiggler” app. I ran a render flawlessly.
I completely understand your logic revolt_randy that the external drive should in theory not be going idle if blender is performing renders from it. The only thing I can think is that perhaps the information is temporarily stored in RAM during render time. I tried last night to simply put it all on my internal drive and do the render, but the problem persisted. However, this Jiggler thing saved the day. The render is going ahead perfectly and it is a huge relief.
A simple solution in the end to a very obscure problem.
That’s great! I wasn’t sure if Jiggler was just cyber-snake oil, and revolt_randy shook my faith even more. Your confirmation makes me think there is something going on that should be preventable, either in the way Blender calls animated textures, or in how OS X handles external drives. I wish I understood better what’s going on, however.
BigMoose: Will you post what version of OS X you’re running, whether your source images were on an external drive, and what revision of Blender you were using (the number appears on the splash screen)? I still think we don’t know enough to claim a bug here, but maybe in the future, and I’d like to have those specs handy.
I’m on OS X 10.6.2, my textures and blend were on a G-Tech external FW800 drive. The latest build I’m using (still with the problem) is r35493, 64-bit.
Glad you got it to work!! I didn’t mean to sound negative about the jiggler, but I don’t think it should be needed. I am thinking this is a bug somewhere. I would like to give it a shot on my win xp machine to see if I have this problem or not, and to help isolate the problem. Let me know BigMoose if you can send me the files and want me to test it out.
Thanks again to both of you.
My OS is Mac OS X V 10.6.6
Blender is 2.56.0 r34076
The hard drive I was originally using is a CalDigit VR set to RAID 1 Configuration (FW800). However, as I mentioned above, I had moved everything to my internal drive in an effort to resolve the problem. benu, with your files on your external drive, are you still using “Jiggler” to render successfully? I had put everything on the internal drive, and ran Jiggler.
Just to calrify, an attempt to run everything from the internal drive had also failed, before using Jiggler with success.
I’ve given a scene to a colleague last night to try rendering the same shot on a Linux machine. I’ll be sure to report back with the results.
@revolt_randy: I wouldn’t call it negativity as much as a reality check. This wouldn’t be the first time I misdiagnose something going wrong in Blender…
I’ve built a test file that I’m going to run tonight. Hopefully [!!!] it will fail, and if it does I’ll upload the file tomorrow…
In addition, if it fails, I’m going to try rendering it once with the Jiggler app running, and again with the source files on the local hard drive.
Thanks for offering to render it on a PC, Randy; that will help us nail down if this is a general Blender thing or if it’s OS-specific.
EDIT: missed your post, BigMoose, before sending this. I have been rendering off the external FW800 drive the entire time. Useful to know that storing things locally doesn’t change things for you.
And my test – a plane with a 5000-frame animated texture on it – didn’t fail. BigMoose: would you be able to upload your file, perhaps removing non-critical elements, so I can try to repeat the error?
Thanks for the link, BigMoose, and thanks for a very orderly & well organized .bend file!!! After setting the start & end frames, I hit the render animation and went to bed. Now I have 40 rendered frames where 2 of the planes with video textures are visible, and they are visible for all 40 frames. One is of a fire, the other of a single indian. No other software was running. Blender 2.56a beta, from blender.org (the most recent official release). So IMO, the file works fine on a win xp machine.
Now, when I made this Video, I downloaded a .blend file and a video file that was the background video. While I was creating the video, I discovered the background video that was feed into blender’s compositor wouldn’t work on individual frames. Example: render frame 1, render frame 250, compositor used the same background image, it didn’t/wouldn’t/couldn’t fetch frame 250 from the video file. Had to break the video file apart into a single frame image sequence and then blender handled it correctly. I could render any frame and the correct background image was used. So I know that blender doesn’t always ‘play nice’ with video files.
So, even though the file works fine for me, the problems you are having might not happen if you used an image sequence instead of a video. But I don’t know for sure, to be honest.
Thanks for giving the file a go. Hearing about your successful render on Windows, and that of my colleague on Linux, is making thing this may be an OS problem. I gave the file to benu as well. We should hear from him after the weekend.
After about 5 hours, on the 90th frame, one of the animated textures disappeared.
The other animated texture in the shot disappeared on the next frame (91)
A couple notes on your render, for what it’s worth:
The flickering tree is due to overlapping meshes. Select the tree and delete it. There will be a second one there, and the flickering will be gone. (There are a few other flickering trees; I’m suspecting this trick will work for those as well.)
The render time for these frames are enormous! It seems like the vector blur is the primary cause for this. Since your camera is moving so slowly the blur doesn’t do much. I suggest you eliminate the vector blur and uncheck “Vector” in your render Layers (so it doesn’t try to calculate them). Doing this alone reduced the render time from around 2 minutes/frame to about 30 seconds/frame.
