Hi, folks,

  Friendly Neighborhood Martok here with a few more tips to try and help alleviate some crash problems some folks (like myself...hahaha) have when trying to render out video projects.  This will likely be old hat to the more veteran artists here, so, as always, this is for the new people:

   First, consider the complexity of your scene.    Consider your assets in the scene: set pieces, characters, backgrounds with video animation.   Obviously, the more you have on-screen, or even just active, the more processing power seems to get taken up....or at least it seems to be in my case.

   If you are doing "on the spot" animations for your characters amidst a complex set, turn your surrounding set off.  If there is an on the set prop you need in order to gauge your characters' interactions, then of course, leave that piece on.    Turn things on and off in the scene manager at this point in the production.  This should allow you to more smoothly create your on the spot animations for your characters.   If things are still a bit too choppy, then you might have to make a separate project and work out the animations there, and import those animations to your characters when back on your set.

   When you feel you are ready to render your video, now is when you need to consider moment to moment asset activity.  If your characters are on the move through the set, be sure to turn off any assets that do not appear on camera at that moment.   For your "moment to moment" ons and offs for your assets, this time you need to use the Visibility on/off buttons in the Modify panel of your UI.  This is especially important if you have backgrounds that have video playback on them, and with characters that are not seen on camera.   If a character or asset goes off camera, turn the character/asset off in the Modify panel.  

    As an additional precaution, to make sure you don't have a lot of things turning on and off all at once, do multiple on/offs at a couple frames apart with each asset.   Turn an asset off, go a couple frames, turn another asset off, go another couple of frames, turn another character off....and so forth and so on  until you have only what you need for proceessing and rendering at the moment.

     If you are planning on rendering out a video that happens to be a few minutes long, and is consisted of very complex assets, you might have to render out smaller sections of the current running project rather than go whole hog.

    Once you have made all your final preparations, and have checked to make sure your playback is going generally the way you want (playback can still be choppy when doing checks) save your project.   Then, close iClone, and fire it back up.   Load up your project, and start rendering right then.   I have found, at least on my computer, that if I try to render out immediately after doing multiple playbacks or adjustments, even after I've saved, that my video renders tend to crash or iClone decides to stop responding if I don't close the app and then fire it back up, load the project, and start rendering from there.

     Again, these are just a few trial and error things I've found help me in my final render out process.   I'm sure a lot of this is a result of my computer.  Your actual mileage may vary.




"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

Ok.
I came in to ask for advicing about my crashing problems and i saw your post.
I realize that crashing problems are normal but i am still having douts about my system.
i have a labtop i7 8 Gb RAM with Geforce 940M 4 GB. Is that enough isnt it?

I work with small scenes (i think). Right now i have a scene total of 3000 frames. The procedure of animating character are very annoying. It goes slow.
i do not include any video backgroud. Just one audio file (mp3 - 1mb) and 2 jpg pictures. When rendering in a point the animation stops and i get only the sound with freezing video.
the project takes 90MB. Is it too much?
I admit i have not turn off the props that doesnt show in the scene (how do i do that? just make it unvisible or erase?). i am going to try it now.

I would appreciate some advicing. I amhaving a feeling that i am doing something wrong.

A! what about supersampling? shall i use it?

Hi, Dourvas,

It sounds like you have good specs on your computer.....should be able to eat iClone alive.  (My laptop has some of the same specs your computer has, and at least ran iClone 5 fine.  It shouldn't have any problems with iClone 6.)

I don't think 90MB is too big of a project at all.   You should be fine on that score. :)

You said that animating is a slow process for you.   Is it that the playback is choppy when you test your animations?   Or is the actual moving of, say, a character's body parts proving taxing on your system?   Whether you do it by "motion layers", or "motion puppet", or "direct puppet"?    I have had those happen to me before, but again, it is probably because my set might be too complex.... and not necessarily because of video or image backgrounds, but because my sets or props might be too highly detailed (I bring a lot of my own props and meshes in from Blender via 3DEXChange, and sometimes, they are pretty big file sizes.)

How many characters/avatars do you have on screen in your project?  How many characters/avatars do you have that are active? (In other words, not on screen, but simply running in your environment?)   If a character/avatar is not on screen, turn off their visibility by going to the Modify tab on the right side of your User Interface.   (iClone 6's UI is configurable, but by default, the Modify tab should be on the right.)   Scroll down the Modify tab, and you should see a subsection called "Visibility".   Beside Visibility, you will see two icons.    An eye that is open, and an eye that is shut.   Clicking on the eye that is shut will turn the visibility of the character off.   

The difference between turning visibility on and off in the Modify tab, as opposed to the Scene Manager (the Scene Manager is usually found on the left side of your UI) is that doing so in the Scene Manager turns the character/asset on or off during the entirety of the project.    Doing so in the Modify tab allows you to have the character on at one point in the project timeline, and then off at another point.

To give you an example, I have the scene I am currently working on populated by six character/avatars, several props, and a plane that is running a video background,  Most of these assets can be seen in the establishing shot.   I have several cameras placed throughout the set, including a roaming camera.    So, I have the roaming camera moving with the two main avatars throughout the set.    The two main characters are moving down the corridor in the set, with a third character moving off-camera to the side.   So, as soon as that particular character is off-screen (whether blocked from the camera by the set, or simply out of the camera's visual range), I go to the "Visibility" section of the Modify tab, and click on the "eye shut" button, which turns the visibility of that avatar "off".    The two main characters continue to move down the corridor, and take a turn down a branching corridor.   Now, the other three characters, the props, and the plane with the video background are off-screen.    So, I go into the Modify tab, select an unneeded asset, and turn its Visibility off.   I advance two more frames, and turn another asset off, advance two more frames and turn the next asset's Visibility off....until all the assets that I do not need for the current frames are off.  Doing this should reduce the processing in the program and make it a bit easier to animate the remaining characters.    If you should come to a point where you need to turn a character or asset back "on", all you have to do is click on the "eye open" icon in the Visibility section of the Modify tab.

3000 frames is not a very long project.   I think the default for iClone 6 is 1800 frames, which I believe is about 30 seconds.    The average for a lot of my planned shots is about two minutes, but sometimes I have to shoot in smaller increments, and edit them all together in a non-linear editor....aka, an external video editor.  (I use either Magix Movie Edit Pro or the HitFilm apps.)

I hope my explanations above help you out, Dourvas.  :)

I use oversampling in a lot of my rendering, unless I want glow effects to play out more fully.    If I want, say, engine glow on one of my starship props to show up more prominently, I turn oversampling off.





"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

thank you very much for your answear. I really aprreciate it

As i thought my computer is allright and my project is neither too big or too long.

When i said that animating is a slow process for me i ment that often when i try an animation to a character as long as she speaks(the character - just one) there is a delay between the animation and the words she is saying. I would say using your own words that the playback is a bit choppy when i test my animations. and i usually use animations ready to use for Qwyen which is my main and only actor

My project is a presenter which she speaks for some seconds. she presents another video which is made with another software.

The main problem i am facing is in rendering. I render into mp4 HD 720p, quality processor both video and audio 8, medium super sampling 2x2.
I am getting (after 2-4 hours - is this logical? - approximetely 1hour every 1000frames) often a video file that the animation stoped sometime in the midlle or near the end and the file, getting the same frame for several seconds to the end (like a freezing video with audio). There are times that i get the expected result and other times that the system crashes down. (there are several projects like the one i mentioned.).

I always restart my computer before rendering to clear memory.

Am i missing something?

Hi, Dourvas,

  I'm glad to help in any way that I can.  Thank you for the kind words. :)

  During the playback of your video (before rendering it), it is very possible that the project may seem to have discrepancy between the character and her speaking....this has happened to me a couple of times as well.  But it usually comes out in the wash.....the video render usually turns out alright.

  Ok....now, when I export video from iClone, I exclusively use the uncompressed AVI format.   I've found that directly exporting to  mp4 in iClone  tends to be really blurry in places, especially when trying to render in hi-def mp4 (720p or higher).   I've never really trusted its mp4 export.    Try exporting to AVI format, and select the uncompressed option.    Now, even for a two minute video, this could result in a video at the memory size of about a couple of gigabytes.  But, you can then take the AVI and convert it to mp4 in an external editor, and then, if you're satisfied with the result, you can delete the memory intensive AVI source video. 

   If you are using a video image playback as part of your animation, I would recommend importing  .WMV formatted video into iClone onto whatever object is presenting the video footage.

   During my renders (when all is going well), I have found render time between frames (when supersampling with high quality shadows) to be on an average of 3-10 seconds per frame.   If you have a lot of effects going on, the average could be 7-20 seconds per frame.     I start to worry if a frame takes more than 20 seconds to render.   At that point, I begin to wonder if iClone is "not responding".     Sometimes the app will push forth, other times, I'll get the "AP has stopped working" message.  (Grrrrr!!!)     Yeah, those mid-render crashes can be pretty frustrating.   In that case, I just let the program close, restart it, and try to render again.   In most cases, I usually get the full render after the second attempt, and sometimes I have to make a third attempt.   If I have to go beyond three attempts, I start exporting the video in shorter segments of the whole, and then assemble it in an external editor.

   Yes, some videos, depending on their length and the complexity of the assets within it, can take quite a while to fully render out.   It can sometimes take from a half hour, to an hour and a half to render out a 1 minute scene, again, depending on the factors listed above.    When I render out space battles, it can take even longer.

    Yeah, it's a good idea, after you are satisfied with how you think the project will turn out, to save your project, close iClone, and then restart your computer.  When you fire up iClone and load your project, get right down to rendering.   Don't do any final checks, because at this point, as I said, this should be a point where you are satisfied with how the video will render.     Also, do not worry.   Just because the playback in iClone might be choppy, the end render will play smoothly.    You will probably find your character doing the speaking to be speaking in all the right spots on your video.

   Again, I hope these tips help you. :)




"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

Martok. I was feeling what you were doing to get a possible solution to rendering crashes and was thinking of doing it until I realized it should speed up the rendering process but is definitely not a sure solution due to my experience on here. I wish you and others would post the specs of their systems so I could get a idea what works. I also think if a guy is going to spend +$1500 for a gaming laptop, and iClone is his main or only software, he's putting 15lbs of crap in in a 5lb pound bag and if I worked for Reallusion I would make a note that iClone was not recommended for laptops due to the horsepower it really needs. With $1500 you can buy a good desktop minus the monitors. Now back to rendering I had a maxed out near the top of the line AMD system and max memory for AMD motherboards and I had the same random rendering crashes from iClone 3 even back with it's memory limitations, regardless of which output format. Last October I switched to Intel first time in decades, I don't have the top processor, because I believe if I pay double, I want at least double the processing. I notice the difference with 64 GB to 128 GB of RAM, and was surprised that it made a difference. I love and understand what you are trying to do, but in reality whether I had 50 objects or 100, iClone crashes on me. So is it really worth taking the time switching off the items while they are not shown because even if they were not there in the project, I will still crash? There are two things Reallusion could fix for me, the rendering crashes which I thought was a AMD thing, and having a better quality mp4 encoder. I'm hoping they would have a H.265 encoder and I know the licensing is expensive, in their iClone 7. For my best quality renders I use PNG sequencing and split into 3000 frames max and that seems to give me the better results. Last week I took a scene of 4 minutes, and compared a direct iC6 output mp4 file at max settings minus the shadows, to a converted PNG seq file then using a good mp4 converter. The PNG to mp4 file was about 15% bigger, than the direct mp4 and it looked just a little better, but not that much of a difference where most would notice. That's how it would look on my Blu~Ray disc. The original mp4 video had a few jumps in the animation rendering and what was disheartening, and the same small jumps or drop frames was identical with the sequential PNG files. So your method which I was going to try will speed up the rendering time, but wont stop my crashes, because iClone crashes on me regardless if the object was there or not before I added it, but thanks and good luck with it. If IClone 7 gives me a free trial, improves its' mp4 encoder, includes a H.265 encoder I'll buy it. But I can be finished with my whole movie by the time it comes out and I'm not going to wait and then find out same old rendering crashing problems. Anything else they add, I don't really need. Okay foot sliding, I've worked around that a few times, and it would be nice if they fixed that. Have a great weekend and thanks again.        

Home built; ASRock X570 Pro 4, AMD Ryzen 9-5950X CPU, AMD RADEON RX6900XT, 16GB video card, 131GB of RAM.

My 2 cents on these:


Be careful when you do that, that your characters, props or whatever have no influence on the lighting, for exemple a character going off camera but still casting shadows in the view of the camera.
Also, iClone7 has realtime Global Illumination through the use of NVidia VXGI, which is awesome, and the influence of off camera characters and objects will be more important than ever and more subtil.
You may get a lot of flickering if you disable/enable the visibility of those characters and objects too quickly.

Perhaps an alternative to this visibility switching, whenever it is possible, is to use "impostors", meaning isolated, rendered bilboards/sprites/.. of an animated (or not) character or an object you then place in your scene (ie popVideo). I believe this is a very underestimated approach.

martok2112 (1/19/2017)

---

../.. If you are planning on rendering out a video that happens to be a few minutes long, and is consisted of very complex assets, you might have to render out smaller sections of the current running project rather than go whole hog../.

This has been discussed several times by the past but if problems and crashes arise when rendering videos then don't render videos: render image sequences. In fact, better always render image sequences : )
If iClone crashes while rendering then you can resume your rendering where it crashed, which you can't do by rendering directly to a video file.


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

Hi, all,

 Thanks for all the input.  :)

  I admit that my solutions probably don't work for everyone. They are more like workarounds.

I will say that my desktop is a Dell meant for gaming, but that's the thing....it's a Dell with AMD graphics,

Win 10 Home 64-bit, AMD FX-8800P Radeon 7, 12 Computer Cores 4C+8G, 2.10Ghz,
RAM: 16GB

.   I wanted to get a specific other type of computer, but that was Black Friday a couple of years ago..... I had missed getting a purchase on the last of my choice computer that they had in stock....by 5 minutes.   GAAHHH!!!

My ASUS laptop, however, did quite well with iClone 5.   I hadn't installed iClone 6 on it yet.

Admittedly, I love.... I mean I LOVE exercises in editing, and doing the "image sequence" approach, and then applying audio later in an NLE is certainly an editing task that sounds like it's right up my alley.    But, in all honesty, that would likely be a last resort for me.   If I can get stuff out in video from iClone first, that's what I'll run with every time.

I also agree that right now, I'm not all that stoked about iClone 7, so I'm in no rush to purchase it.    For all its shortcomings I am still pretty pleased with iClone 6.

I do try to be conscious about doing the "asset on/off" thing of lighting and shadow effects changes as a result.   If I see a boo boo as a result of said changes, I try to correct it before rendering.....buuuutttt.... sometimes one boo boo will escape. :)

Thanks for providing the backup input on the case....it indeed could have been some stuff I would've missed. :)




"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

thanks for the advice, for us the crashes are more and more often and the more irritating part is after the program crashes and I open the scene again, the hair of the characters is all messed up to a point that even if I delete the hair and replace or even if I use the conform tool it still gets completely destroyed. We lose so much time with this, the program crashes and we have to place replace everything.

I made a ticket and sent some scenes to support some time ago ... it seams there is no one there.
The issue is even more problematic that old scenes that we used and rendered fine, when opened now, the hair of the characters is destroyed, and again nothing works to fix this (conform, replace etc)

Ugh!  I wish I had some advice about the nature of your crashes, and their aftermath.   That certainly sucks.

Knock on wood, I haven't had those problems, but is there anyone here who might be able to address Laurent's situation. :)




"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112