I am not sure if the next one is a bug or what, but surely I would like to dig a bit into the details.
Here is a copy of the ticket I sent to RL, on behalf of general understanding/information.
Here we go...

I have a pretty much complex project and I wish to create a preview, rendering "in toto". i.e. about 18000 frames.

I went for AVI uncompressed 1980x1080.
If I choose the Render Quality = Final Render and leave the Super Sampling and High Quality Shadow unchecked, the render completes with no crash.
But as soon as I enable one of these settings, after a certain time, IC crashes during the rendering.
If I render a shorter section (e.g. 3000 frames), the rendering does not crashes even with these options checked.
This means that the probability of a crash seems to proportional to the length of the video being rendered.

So, my question is: what kind of resources do these options need ?
More RAM ? I have 16GB... not enough ?
More CPU power ? I have a i7-4970 8-core processor @3.6GHz
More power on a video card ? I have the Nvidia GTX980 with 4GB RAM...

The online manual says pretty much nothing about these controls. That is all of what we have: "You may enable the Super Sampling and/or High Quality Shadow boxes to enhance the quality of the exported media."

If anyone has some more information, I would appreciate if it could be shared.

Cheers

Roberto


My PC:
OS: Windows 10 Pro English 64-bit / CPU: Intel i7-9700 3.6GHz / MB: ASUS ROG Strix Z390  RAM: 32GB DDR4 2.6GHz / HD: 2TB+3TB  /  SSD: 2x512GB Samsung 860 EVO + 1x2TB Samsung
VB: Palit GTX2080 TI GamingPro 11GB / AB: embedded in the MB and VB (audio from the MOTU M4 I/F) / DirectX: 12

I stopped being hard on myself and file these things as bugs as fast as I can.

They HAVE told us in the latest bug fix report about this problem.

If you look for patches in your account there are some options to read the list of fixes in the neighbourhood of downloading it. Should give you a clue there that they know.


http://www.youtube.com/user/elektron2kim?

My first thought is, "Cooling."

Super Sampling, High Quality Shadow both increase the rendering effort.  That, running for longer times, may be causing an overheating issue.

Try monitoring some temps.  Your motherboard should have some utilities.  It could be the CPU, GPU, RAM, or even a motherboard (chipset) that's getting hot.

Another option is to open up your case and literally point a fan into it and see if you can run at full intensity for longer times.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Thanks to both of you for the replies.

Elektron2Kim:

1. I did not know RL is aware of this problem
2. I clearly state that "I am not sure this is a bug"... so, why making so much noise ? :)
If my post offended you, sorry I can't do so much. I think it had nothing offensive within it.

@Dennis:

I will try...
But actually this is not a blocking point, because at the end I will render the various pieces, one for each cameras.
But I was curious to understand what is going on "under the hood" :)


My PC:
OS: Windows 10 Pro English 64-bit / CPU: Intel i7-9700 3.6GHz / MB: ASUS ROG Strix Z390  RAM: 32GB DDR4 2.6GHz / HD: 2TB+3TB  /  SSD: 2x512GB Samsung 860 EVO + 1x2TB Samsung
VB: Palit GTX2080 TI GamingPro 11GB / AB: embedded in the MB and VB (audio from the MOTU M4 I/F) / DirectX: 12

I render image sequences, which probably don't have the kind of overhead as a single AVI would have. I also always split my project up so I never render much more than 3000 frames at the time.

Your 18,000 frames will give you a 37.3 GB file, and I assume that it is written to disk in stages. I've never worked with such large files. There may be temp files, so you would need enough space for that. But what is puzzling is that without the quality settings things are fine, so it doesn't seem to be file handling.

You could monitor RAM usage with Task Manager and see if it goes up, which would indicate a memory leak of some sort.

Another thing you can do is monitoring GPU temperature and video RAM usage with GPU-Z.

I'm not aware of any issue being reported or confirmed in this area. There are issues with rendering sequence to Indigo, but that is another matter. In fact, the only overload I have encountered thus far is with rendering an Indigo sequence.

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Hi Job,

actually I will also split the final rendering in elements of 2-3000 frames and then recompose in Vegas.
But I need a full rendering at high quality to see the whole project and also to check if the sync with the audio is correct (the video from iClone shall be be perfectly re-synced with another audio).
In reality, I could just render as "Preview" quality and it fit the purpose.
But then I became greedy and tried to the High Quality setting, in order to see how does it look like... and then i found the crashes...
Not a big issue though... but I wondered where is "the limit" for the rendering ;)

Roberto


My PC:
OS: Windows 10 Pro English 64-bit / CPU: Intel i7-9700 3.6GHz / MB: ASUS ROG Strix Z390  RAM: 32GB DDR4 2.6GHz / HD: 2TB+3TB  /  SSD: 2x512GB Samsung 860 EVO + 1x2TB Samsung
VB: Palit GTX2080 TI GamingPro 11GB / AB: embedded in the MB and VB (audio from the MOTU M4 I/F) / DirectX: 12

My advices on these issues:

- always render image sequences (you shouldn't have any audio sync issue if you set the same FPS at render time and when you create a avi, mov, etc.. from those images). I understand peoples want to see an immediate result by rendering directly to a video file, but if you render long sequences like you, then it is always a risk of having to redo it many times until it "doesn't crash" - and it is not always iClone specific, there may be codecs issues as well, as codecs can crash too).

- even with all the iClone "high" quality switches turned on, you wont get proper anti-aliasing of your images nor your shadows. That's just a fact. To have a decent quality, try to render at 8192xXXX, then resize those images after rendering to your original size (photoshop batch, etc..) then make your movie of it. You may be surprised how much more quality you can get from doing this. The default 3x3 super sampling is not enough (yet it is "super sampling", not "multi sampling", which is lower quality than multi sampling at the same rate because the samples are always "centered" in the pixel). Yet, 3x3, that is 9 samples, is not enough, 16 is considered a bare minimum - in general - so by rendering at 8192xXXX you get 5x5 that is 25 samples per pixel, which is much better.You should at least consider rendering at 4096 to have at least 4x4/16 samples per pixel. That is, if your final rendering is at ~2K (Full HD, ..). It will be slower to render of course, but try it at least once, just in order to see the gain in quality you cant get. Then you decide.

--
guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

Interesting. So that's new then in iClone 6 that you can actually render at 8192x4608. I'd seen the UHD setting, but hadn't tried to go above that.

We learn every day! :cool:

I used to output at 1280x720 (as target), but I'm now upping it to 1920x1080.

Is there anything post-processing-wise that could be done to the image sequences for further improvement?

---

1) Motion Blur
A way to improve a lot the final images is to recreate motion-blur from the rendered images, especially if your final fps is 24/25. This can be done in HitFilm for instance, which uses optical flow to track the motion of pixels. It does not work perfectly in every cases, but it is better to have it than not.

2) Color Grading
This is the 'Graal' of cinematography. Artists often try to have their final images directly at render time, while what's most important is to have proper lighting and color "informations". (similar to shooting films, perhaps you have seen how does look like a 'cine gamma' image - or whatever the actual used LUT - from a movie camera, those images look like washed out but contain everything needed for color grading, and the final "look" is done at color grading time).

Regarding the aliasing issues though, not much, there are some post-process antialiasing plugins and filters but they tend to blur the image unfortunately. Having proper antialiasing at render time is really the basis for proper cinematography (even before having proper linear workflow ;) ahem..)

--
guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

Effectively, post-process is used a lot for CGI animation but I think it is the old way. Today , I think the futur will be all done in realtime with a first pass... Regarding what can UDK do with this all realtime engine:




I dream that one day iClone can do this :w00t: