I'm curious if its a known behavior that mantra crashes if it renders with -n parameter (multi process) and in the same time camera has cropped view via Crop Tab in Camera Properties. Can I crop window in other way - not so disturbing for mantra?

thanks for advice,
SYmek

Works for me here on something simple “mantra -n 4” to ip with crop window on WinXP SP2, Houdini 8.0.530.

hi edward,
can you render this with cropped ROP?

http://www.es2k.net/pic/cropped.hipnc [es2k.net]

because I don't.

Houdini 8.0474, WINXPSP2

thanks,
SY.

Hmmm. Worked OK here - 8.0.535 on Linux…

Try a more recent windows build and see if that helps. If that doesn't work, verify that it also crashes if you write out to disk instead of to iplay. It's conceivable it's a multi-threaded process talking to a single iplay on Windows issue(graphics?).

Cheers,

J.C.

hey JColdrick!
well I've already tested render on disk, it still doesn't work. Maybe it's my Pentium D makes trouble. I posted this topic a while a go and from that time already figured out that muliprocess is not the best thing for rendering - in mantra at least. Most of advanced mantra's features simple doesn't work in MP mode. Well just from ignotant's point of view it quite obvious thought it would be nice to have faster feedback in viewport render tests. As I understand it's much easer for compositing app to split work - just cut frame into peaces and send it to many threats but how mantra can handle situation in which ray is sent from left part of frame and hit surface in right side…? So, I'm not very ungry with these holes in Houdini monument… thought:
- GI cache is not supported (whenever in local mulithreat or network spread)
- IPR is not supported
- mantra in multprocess mode can't optimize scene correctly (at leat efficiently) and renders black and empty screen! So in case you have one object in frame and lots of empty area (quite often) muliprocess is slower then single one! this is really bad. That's why I decided to crop camera view… but here apears my problem with mantra crashing. For a long time I thought it's normal behavior since noone has answered my question.
Of course I understand that all this story about muliprocess is important only in work-in-progress time since final rander can be efficiently managed via network. But the main reason for using muliti CPU architecture is to have faster feedback in interface, so it's pitty I have to do the trade “Would IPR be fater then ”-n“ in this particuar case or not?” or can't use GI cache which makes GI in mantra Gold feature so most timecomsuming process of tweaking my scene have to rely just on half of my CPU power.

After all I've learned to render from command line and split my passes equally for evey of my two cores and not to use in interface “-n” or “-H” options.

Anyway thanks for your interest,
cheers,
SY.

PS I will try to check my prolblem in linux instalation on the same H version and send info.

I agree multiprocessor support for mantra needs improving. Some people here don't see any speedups at all(which might be related to the “black” issue you mentioned). With multi-core systems likely to become the standard over the next year or two, this will be a critical feature.

Cheers,

J.C.

What versions of Houdini do you have installed? Try using the latest installed version of Houdini that you have.

Hey guys sorry to butt in but i just checked this file out and the render crashes when you render the cropped camera. Now the regular camera renders fine… I'm running Houdini 8.0.564 build on a dual Amd Opteron 275 dual core 2 gig ram and quadra fx 1100 card latest drivers Boxx machine running Win xp … It gives some wierd message on the mplay : UT_NetPacket::write: No such file or directory mantra: Network Error Unable to write data…So i used mplay for output picture … And it works fine….. So i don;t understand it … if it;s just a setting issue or if it;s mantra….


George

Hey guys sorry to butt in but i just checked this file out and the render crashes when you render the cropped camera. Now the regular camera renders fine… I'm running Houdini 8.0.564 build on a dual Amd Opteron 275 dual core 2 gig ram and quadra fx 1100 card latest drivers Boxx machine running Win xp … It gives some wierd message on the mplay : UT_NetPacket::write: No such file or directory mantra: Network Error Unable to write data…So i used mplay for output picture … And it works fine….. So i don;t understand it … if it;s just a setting issue or if it;s mantra….


George

Cylibral, do you have any other Houdini builds installed?

sorry for the double posts … don; tknow why it did that .. I have an other build Houdini 8.0.474 but didn;t try it out on that… yet..

Edward:
as I wrote I have Houdini 8.0474 and this is the only version ever installed on this system (Win was installed a month a go), so it's definitely not a problem of muli-instalation. I think this has something to do with multicore.

SY.

Ok, I think the problem is that -n 2 is the same as -H localhost,localhost which means that it won't run using an Apprentice license.