Problem with Iray render engine

antonio.maraziti

Hi,
I am a new Daz3d Studio user, I am having some problems while rendering a dforce hair (Kensington Hair), even in a very simple scene (Genesis 8.1 female + hair, nothing else) using Iray (photoreal).
As soon as I start the render, my PC halts and I have to manually reset it.
This did not happen until a couple of days ago, I have some renders with this hair and a character + outfit. Now the same scene I had rendered before does not render anymore and my PC stops working.
I suspect something has corrupted, I have reinstalled Daz Central + Studio and the hair content, but nothing changed. Should I reinstall something else? 

I also run a memory test of my PC that gave no errors. The Windows event log does not show anything anomalous, except the forced restart. My PC is usually very stable (never halts doing other things) so no doubt that it is Iray to halt it.

My PC has Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7400 CPU @ 3.00GHz, 8GB RAM and Nvidia GTX 1050 GPU, but the render happens in the CPUs. I do not complain about render times, but in this case the PC halts completely. 

The last lines of the log file are as follows:

2022-04-10 15:26:35.033 Iray [INFO] - IMAGE:IO ::   1.0   IMAGE  io   info : Loading image "C:\Users\Antonio\OneDrive\Documenti\DAZ 3D\Studio\My Daz Connect Library\data\cloud\1_42071\runtime\textures\daz\characters\genesis8_1\femalebase\g8_1tearopacity.jpg", no selector, pixel type "Rgb", 1024x1024x1 pixels, 1 miplevel.
2022-04-10 15:26:35.038 Iray [INFO] - IMAGE:IO ::   1.0   IMAGE  io   info : Loading image "C:\Users\Antonio\OneDrive\Documenti\DAZ 3D\Studio\My Daz Connect Library\data\cloud\1_82838\runtime\textures\philw\kensington hair\kh haircap trans.jpg", no selector, pixel type "Rgb", 4000x4000x1 pixels, 1 miplevel.
2022-04-10 15:26:35.040 Iray [INFO] - IMAGE:IO ::   1.0   IMAGE  io   info : Loading image "C:\Users\Antonio\OneDrive\Documenti\DAZ 3D\Studio\My Daz Connect Library\data\cloud\1_82838\runtime\textures\philw\kensington hair\kh haircap diffuse.jpg", no selector, pixel type "Rgb", 4000x4000x1 pixels, 1 miplevel.
2022-04-10 15:26:35.043 Iray [INFO] - IMAGE:IO ::   1.0   IMAGE  io   info : Loading image "C:\Users\Antonio\OneDrive\Documenti\DAZ 3D\Studio\My Daz Connect Library\data\cloud\1_82838\runtime\textures\philw\kensington hair\kh haircap bump.jpg", no selector, pixel type "Rgb", 4000x4000x1 pixels, 1 miplevel.
2022-04-10 15:27:57.695 Iray [INFO] - IMAGE:IO ::   1.0   IMAGE  io   info : Loading image "C:\Users\Antonio\OneDrive\Documenti\DAZ 3D\Studio\My Daz Connect Library\data\cloud\1_82838\runtime\textures\philw\kensington hair\light brown.jpg", no selector, pixel type "Rgb", 512x512x1 pixels, 1 miplevel.
2022-04-10 15:28:11.767 Iray [INFO] - IMAGE:IO ::   1.0   IMAGE  io   info : Loading image "C:\Daz 3D\Applications\64-bit\DAZ 3D\DAZStudio4\shaders\iray\resources\DTHDR-RuinsB-500.hdr", no selector, pixel type "Rgb_fp", 512x256x1 pixels, 1 miplevel.
2022-04-10 15:28:29.979 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER ::   1.0   IRAY   rend info : Updating geometry.
2022-04-10 15:28:30.024 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER ::   1.0   IRAY   rend info : Updating motion transforms.
2022-04-10 15:28:30.026 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER ::   1.0   IRAY   rend info : Importing scene graph.

Can anybody help?
Thanks

Richard Haseltine

The log isn't written at once, it's buffered and written during idle(r) moments, so that probably isn't very current for the freeze. From the description my guess would be something is overheating, check your fans are working and see how temperatures go during other tasks. I doubt the GPU is being used, so the CPU is probably working flat-out.

antonio.maraziti

Richard Haseltine said:

The log isn't written at once, it's buffered and written during idle(r) moments, so that probably isn't very current for the freeze. From the description my guess would be something is overheating, check your fans are working and see how temperatures go during other tasks. I doubt the GPU is being used, so the CPU is probably working flat-out.

Thanks for your reply. The CPU temperatures are at about 60°C when the freeze happens, so it should not be the problem. I cleaned all the fans just to be sure, but the problem still happens. I can confirm that rendering happens in the CPU (GPU utilization is about zero). Maybe the hair makes the scene so complex that 8GB memory is not enough? Might the Scene Optimizer tool help (for line elements like hair)? 

PerttiA

antonio.maraziti said:

Maybe the hair makes the scene so complex that 8GB memory is not enough? 

Probably 

antonio.maraziti

What is strange is that I could render those scenes before. The only thing I did in Daz was installing new content, but that is not present in the scene I am trying to render. I also reset render settings to default. Unless I modified by mistake some other parameter, but I cannot wonder what it is.

antonio.maraziti

I noticed that the Windows pagefile size (automatically managed by Windows) was slowly increasing, before it was 22GB, when I checked again it was 25GB. I changed the setting to manual and put it to 32-48GB and it seems that solved the problem.

If I upgrade the system to 16GB it could even be better, I think.

Thanks for support.

hansolocambo

A freeze of the whole operating system is not common. I can keep mine ON for months (Windows 10) without having to ever restart except for major Windows updates. If your GTX 1050 is the 2 or 3 GB DDR version, this could explain the freeze (Nvidia tries to promote their GPUs power with iRay and not enough VRAM can cause troubles, although iRay became nowadays pretty stable as far as I'm concerned and switches succesfully to CPU/RAM if GPU/VRAM requirements are not met).

What you could try is to proceed by elimination :

1/ Render Settings Tab > Advanced > Photoreal Mode : If you have CPU and CUDA ticked. Try to select only CPU.

Render Settings Tab > Advanced > Interactive (Biased) Mode : Just to be sure, select only CPU there too.

This will totally deactivate the use of your GPU for renders. They'll be slower but at least if the render doesn't freeze your PC, you'll know the issue comes from the Graphic card.

If it still crashes, then it's not a GPU or VRAM issue, but rather a CPU or RAM issue.

2/ RAM and VRAM, even if thoroughly tested, can be faulty. Overclocking can also cause components to be damaged. Try to run benchmarks that will cluster test RAM and VRAM.

Try "Video Memory stress Test" (free) to test your VRAM. Available on Majorgeek and other websites. Or GpuMemTest, OCCT, etc. as you have an Nvidia card.

For the RAM there are usually RAM testing options in the Bios. Many apps do that, sometimes you need to install the app on an USB and change boot priority. Sorry I can't advice an app for that as I didn't do such a thing for a while.

 

I usually don't like those "solutions" that seem unrelated to the problem. But a Windows freeze without any overheating could definitely be caused by a faulty component. You got to stress test a bit your hardware to be sure that it doesn't come from that. If not, then :

3/ Start DAZ > Help > Troubleshooting > View Log File : Delete all content, save.

Or go to C:\Users\YOUR_NAME\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4\log.txt           Open the txt, clear its content, save.

Then re-try to render your scene. If it crashes again. Post the updated log content here and hopefully it will help someone to understand what's causing your issue.

Good luck.

PerttiA

hansolocambo said:

If it still crashes, then it's not a VRAM issue, but rather a RAM issue.

 

It was a RAM issue - Not enough RAM and not enough pagefile to cover for the missing RAM.