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How Much Do You Babysit Mantra?


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Hi guys,

I was hoping to render out some of my works done in Houdini to send a DVD to that Rhythm & Hues apprentice program. But I guess I just won't make it in time.

I know my comp. is far from a ideal cg workstation, but I always manage to render my animations with some patience... in another application :huh: As for Mantra, I can rarely render more then 50 frames straight. I have all types of weird lockup at a frame, and Mantra just sits there waiting for me to say OK to that message window (something like "I cant render this..."). After that it just continues fine into the next frame.

The question is as the title, "How much do you have to babysit your renderings". Is it me? :) and my poor machine? Is it my Apprentice version that not being able to bake objects to disk makes it too hard for the rendering process?

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we lose quite a few frames when rendering very heavy geometry. When rendering small stuff its not a problem. We have an hscript that looks for the missing frames and then fills in the gaps.

However we render out ifds, and so we only lose odd frames it doesn't stop the whole sequence.

You could try rendering using a loop in hscript, doing one frame at a time, i think that is often more stable than rendering a sequence. Also if one frame fails it will more likely go on to do the next one.

if you are on windows turn off error reporting - under "my computer" -> properties. That way when mantra crashes you don't get a dialog window open up and wait for a user input.

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Also if one frame fails it will more likely go on to do the next one.

if you are on windows turn off error reporting - under "my computer" -> properties. That way when mantra crashes you don't get a dialog window open up and wait for a user input.

Thank you, that is exactly what is going on. It goes to the next frame... once I click the OK. I'll try the disable error report hack.

The animation I was trying right now was that procedural city I did for the 42nodes contest. Might not be too complex, but I guess it is for my computer.

Good thing to hear that is not just me. And since none of the animations are too long, I can go frame by frame checking for missing or corrupted ones.

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if you are on windows turn off error reporting - under "my computer" -> properties. That way when mantra crashes you don't get a dialog window open up and wait for a user input.

Thank you Sibbarric, that really did it for me. Maybe it is just one big coinsidence but I'm managing to get full renders non stop and believe it or not, no missing frames yet.

One thing that I hate in windows, is how it seems to always be doing something, even whe is not doing anything. As an example... the 7 instances of SVCHOST.EXE running as I type this. :angry:

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