Anyone having performance issues with C4 Pro? I have been having problems rendering animations, and at times even just a single still frame.

These files I am trying to render are pretty large in size with a lot of objects in them, but they render fine, (a little slow) but just fine in Carrara 3 - even on a little G3 333mhz iMac. The machine I am using C4Pro with is an eMac G4 800mhz with 1 gig of RAM. When I render them in C4Pro, they either crash the program, lock up on a certain frame in the animation, or stop rendering during the middle of a still frame, but not lock up the program - until I cancel or abort the render.

I have reset prefs, re-installed, clean installed, upgraded and down-graded through all 4 update patches, everything I can think of - I'm about ready to down-grade to C3 just to get some rendering done. Any ideas, thoughts?

Chuck

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=106&Form.ShowMessage=2080201

Hi chuck, I'm having the same performance problems here with my C4 Pro. The machine I'm using is an PC 3.4ghz with 2 gig of RAM. I just start the production of my 3D short film and I was trying to use C4 PRO on this project but after all the performance issues I had on January, maybe I'll be forced to move to MAYA. Sorry Eovia. Claudio

What render settings are you using?

As for render settings, my normal settings for this project are:

Photorealistic:
Shadows
Reflections
Refractions
Bump
Transparency

Anti-Alias: Best
Object: 0.5
Shadow: 0.5
Sharpness: 75
Ray Depth: 12

720 x 360 - 72dpi
Sequenced TGA

But I have even tested with the following settings and still had problems -
Anti-Alias: None
Object: 4
Shadow: 4

Like I said, these files render slow, but fine in C3, even on slower machines.

Chuck

I would suggest sending the file to Eovia if you can , they can't fix what they dont know is broken. I don't do many animations so I haven't run into this, are you using any plugins like Replica or Deeper. I had problems with deeper and renderings not finishing, I disabled the "bump" in the render settings and it rendered fine. Good luck,
Mike

Message edited on: 02/02/2005 07:34

Are the files saved in C4 format? Or are they loaded from C3 format?

The files have been saved and tested in both C3 & C4 formats.

Well, now I think I have it narrowed down to a single model that is in all the scenes that are crashing... so that's encouraging. Now I just have to figure out what's wrong with the model. :-) The scenes were built in C3 originally.

Chuck

Message edited on: 02/02/2005 18:24

I'd definetly email Eovia the file. They are quite fast at responding. The only thing I can say is I haven't had issues with C3 files, or unusually long render times.

Hi Chuck, I've had similar, model induced issues in scenes before. Drag each model into the browser creating a library, duplicate your scene deleting all the existing objects and drag the browser objects back two or three at a time until you have a failure during render. Speeds up the identification process. Don't be surprised if you never reproduce the failure after dragging models saved in the browser back into your scene though. Sometimes saving objects into the browser "fixes" issues with models. Working with models from other programs like Poser, Amapi etc., but importing them as .obj or .3ds files will sometimes create duplicate vertexes when imported into Carrara and seem to create more render failures than others. If presented with the option to "Weld identical vertices" pops up, select it. These kind of things drive me nuts and seem to increase as the deadlines decrease! BTW, failed renderings due to mesh/normals/texture issues is not unique to Carrara. ;) Good luck tracking it down.

For what its worth, sometimes a Select All, Copy (close corrupted document), (open new document), Paste, will clear up problems. Often it won't but its quick and easy.

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the testing tip in the browser... I'll give it a try when I get home. I have sent a file off to Eovia - just to see if they find something wrong.

Last night I turned off "Reflections" in the Render Room and it did finally render the frame. I love shiny, metal models. ;-P But, I shouldn't have to reduce render settings to get a render done in C4. I just find it really odd that these files would render perfectly with no crashing in C3 and have so many problems in C4. Frustrating. :-)

Chuck

For what it's worth, there do seem to be problems with shaders made in C3 and rendered/opened in C4. I've seen a lot of info lost in the conversion, but ironicly it was simple stuff: like a single color in the glow channel kicked the whole shader to default.... (At least that's I finally decided was the problem.) Just suggesting that while you are rebuilding the models, you might as well look over the shaders too.

Decal shaders used in CPro 4.0 have to be checked when used in Cpro 4.0.3, too.

Re: C4 Pro Performance Issues?
by SHONNER on 2/3/05 14:19
Decal shaders used in CPro 4.0 have to be checked when used in Cpro 4.0.3, too

Yeah, I noticed that first. I did go through and fix those, and thought that was the original problem... but it kept happening after the fix as well.

Chuck

Just to follow up with those who are interested... I sent a file off to Eovia to have them take a look and see if they could figure out my problem. I had narrowed it down to too much reflection causing the crash, but still wasn't sure that was it. Here is the response I got from Eovia Tech Support: " This is a known issue and there is a bug regarding it that has been fixed and will be released in the next patch." So, good news! Looking forward to the next update. :-) Chuck

That's the message they always send me when I email them something. Then I find the same problems in the next release. I have a work-arounds written up for all kinds of problems.

Message edited on: 02/12/2005 20:54