Hi everyone,

Please don't laugh too hard at me, but I've been a member here for quite a while and didn't realize there was a Carrara-specific forum here. Even though I knew there were forums... Yes, pretty much as dumb as it gets.

Anyhow, to the topic at hand: I have a Mac and a PC, and PC has inferior specs, but I've been using it for most of my work, since Mac is new and I didn't have time to set it up yet. However, if the scene in Carrara was saved internally, it doesn't need a set up content system to work anywhere, so I decided to try using Mac as a rendering machine. And here is the problem:

I can transfer my scenes onto Mac and open them, navigate, alter and save them with no problem. However, scenes which render fine on the inferior PC (with same render settings and everything the same), crash on the Mac during rendering, with the usual "application exited unexpectantly" message.

Is it a well known issue on the Mac that I'm not aware of? Or am I doing something wrong here?

Details:
Carrara 7.2
PC: quad core 2.5, 4gb RAM, XP64
MAC: quad core 2.66, 8GB RAM, OS X.5

Thank you for you help.
Antara.

 Hi Antara,

The scenes should render a-ok on both computers so i don't really know what the issue is other than possibly a plug-in being PC instead of Mac.

Tthere is a known issue of Mac multiprocessors running slower because Carrara hasn't apparantly been fully optimized for Macs cores yet. 

Hi Mark,

Thank you very much for responding.

I don't think I am using any Win-specific plug-ins in my scene. And since I don't have plug-ins installed on the Mac, wouldn't the scene give me an error at load time, if it required plug-ins which were not there?

True, the scenes in question are rather heavy for rendering, they take over 18 hours to render on my PC, and the Mac Carrara did render a much lighter scene without a problem, but I still don't see the reason to crush on the heavies scene when it renders fine on PC.

I saved the crush report, but I don't see anything there, that would clearly raise a red flag...

I am just not sure whether it is something that should be files as a bug report, or it is just me, doing something stupid.

Again, thank you very much for your help.

I used both PC and Macs (multiprocessor) Intel core duo 2Ghz. Mac is a littl bit faster.
I did not experienced any crash of that kind.
Try to allocate more temp memory if you use hudge size texture maps.

have you up dated the system software? should be 10.5.8 

also a big thing to try is repair permissions (applications, utilities folder, Disk utility, run program, click on repair permissions at the bottom left)

just guesses here without looking at the file.

did you buy all the memory with the mac? or get some after market?  have some mis-matched?

One other thing is to check all the files attached, try deleting all the textures, see if it renders in all gray without an issue, I have run into Images (mostly jpegs) which have "extra information" attached to them from PC's that will bug out a mac because it's not supposed to be there. 

if it renders OK in all gray try opening any base texture maps as images in Photoshop or any basic image edit and do a "save as" this will clear out the virus info..

again, just guessing here but usually when that happens it's a file attached not the computer or the application.... or memory errors

Quote - have you up dated the system software? should be 10.5.8 

also a big thing to try is repair permissions (applications, utilities folder, Disk utility, run program, click on repair permissions at the bottom left)

just guesses here without looking at the file.

did you buy all the memory with the mac? or get some after market?  have some mis-matched?

One other thing is to check all the files attached, try deleting all the textures, see if it renders in all gray without an issue, I have run into Images (mostly jpegs) which have "extra information" attached to them from PC's that will bug out a mac because it's not supposed to be there. 

if it renders OK in all gray try opening any base texture maps as images in Photoshop or any basic image edit and do a "save as" this will clear out the virus info..

again, just guessing here but usually when that happens it's a file attached not the computer or the application.... or memory errors

Thank you very much for these ideas!

The memory was all included. And the OS is updated to 10.5.8.

But I will definitely try your permissions and textures suggestions. Thank you! I didn't think about these 2 possibilities. And I had permissions messed up for another app ones, so it is definitely a possibility.

Hopefully I'll have some time over the weekend to deal with this, so I'll post again when I get some results.

 ya, it might help.. one other thing you might want to try is get MAINMENU... it's a little program that runs all the mac's service/repair/upkeep scripts for you...  download it and run, set up the "batch tasks" to do everything it can... When ever my Mac gets all PC  like :scared: I run that and it seems to fix all the weird things...   :thumbupboth:

Quote -  ya, it might help.. one other thing you might want to try is get MAINMENU... it's a little program that runs all the mac's service/repair/upkeep scripts for you...  download it and run, set up the "batch tasks" to do everything it can... When ever my Mac gets all PC  like :scared: I run that and it seems to fix all the weird things...   :thumbupboth:

Some other helpful apps for OS X maintenance are : ONYX (complete service/repair) and MAINTENANCE.
Hope that may help, but in this case I guess that there's a virtual memory allocation problem (preferences/imaging-scratch disk/texture spooling).
;)

Quote - > Quote -  ya, it might help.. one other thing you might want to try is get MAINMENU... it's a little program that runs all the mac's service/repair/upkeep scripts for you...  download it and run, set up the "batch tasks" to do everything it can... When ever my Mac gets all PC  like :scared: I run that and it seems to fix all the weird things...   :thumbupboth:

Some other helpful apps for OS X maintenance are : ONYX (complete service/repair) and MAINTENANCE.
Hope that may help, but in this case I guess that there's a virtual memory allocation problem (preferences/imaging-scratch disk/texture spooling).
;)

ONYX and MainMenu are basically the same thing, I have found MainMenu actually does more. though I haven't looked at the last few versions of Onyx....

 Yes, and Onyx is free :)

Status update:

HolyForest, thank you for the Onyx idea and the disk memory suggestion. Both carried out.

thomllama, permissions repaired, and still no go. So I'll be messing with images next...

Thank you both for your ideas. I am still hoping to get this to work.

If images are indeed the culprit, is there any good work-flow algorithm to minimize the hustle of transferring the files from Windows to Mac?

 I have my pc and mac networked with ethernet and use  a software called DAVE (by thursby) which makes the computers look at each other's drives just like normal.  ie read write etc with no problems.
You can easily transfer stuff across that way as the computers don't have trouble seeing each others drives at all.
 
Love esther

 o you can just copy the files from pc to dvd and put the dvd into your mac

Quote -  I have my pc and mac networked with ethernet and use  a software called DAVE (by thursby) which makes the computers look at each other's drives just like normal.  ie read write etc with no problems.
You can easily transfer stuff across that way as the computers don't have trouble seeing each others drives at all.
 
Love esther

Thank you. I didn't know about the program.

I think the problem I have might be in the texture files. And saving a complex scene's textures externally is a daunting task. I am also thinking of getting Parallels, in which case, I'll just render stuff inside Windows on the Mac, if it all ends up working, of course :).

Thank you all for your help.