I render sequence with renderman in HOUDINI 6, but it shut down my computer when about 5 frames had been rendered….
It seems that it was the environment value problem, but it is alright, because I can render the single frame perfectly in Houdini 6.
It seems that the problem is about the renderman settings, but I can perfectly render sequence in maya4.5 with Mtor………
I can't get an idea now…..anyone can help me?

There isn't much to go on here.

If your computer is freezing or locking you out, chances are you are running out of memory.

Things that can cause this:
- eyesplits problem. If the geometry is very close to the camera, then you will have trouble with PRMan. I don't know how you are bringing the camera values over ( ro the scene for that matter). Maya's camera settings are in inches and houdini is in millimeters. Getting this wrong can be fatal in that the geometry can get too small in the scene and reyes hates that consuming huge amounts of memory. Reyes is not the best as a macro lens renderer.
- setting Shading Quality incorrectly. In Houdini, the shading quality is the inverse of the setting in the rib. A value of 2 is very high, 1.25 is high, 1 is the default 0.2 is very fast.
- incorreclty setting the displace bounds too high in the object(s)

How are you applying the shaders to the geometry?
Are you using instancing? Rib Archaives? Procedural DSO's?

As I said, not much info to go on here.

hi, thank you!
may be the problem is caused by memory…..but I don't think the low memory would shut down my computer…..so bizarrerie!!!!
I apply the shaders to the geometry by adding “shadername” in the render tab of obj op..and I can render single picture perfectly…….
I will try again ,thank you!
and have you ever suffered this?

I have tryed it yesterday. when I use small quality render, it is ok. When I enlarge the picture size, it shut down my computer… is it really the problem of memory??

It sounds like it. You can turn on the verbose level of Renderman to see what is happening. To do this just use:

render -time

See the renderman user guide about command line options to put in the render command to get more specific verbose output. I bet there is a problem with one of the topics I mentioned before.

Linux and Windows both tend to crash when you use up all physical memory and swap. You could increase the swap on your system if you do find that it is a memory issue.

Some tools to monitor memory useage are:

Linux:
top
system useage toolbar application

Windows:
Task Manager (RightMouseButton hold in the bottom toolbar in the windows desktop and select Task Manager)


If this is windows NT, then there is no console so getting this output can be difficult. If you have cygwin installed on Windows and you also installed X in the cygwin installer, you can startx in a cygwin shell and test it out there. Works great for me on WinXP to debug unix tools that error out to the console.

hi, it seems that it's not the renderman problem..
when I use maya renderer to render a large scene, it shut down my computer ,I think it is the memory's problm or cpu's.
my cpu is AMD XP2000+and 256ddr266

You only have 256MB of memory. Get more memory. 512MB is the absolute minimum these days. You should have just as much swap or more to get past the memory crunch. Swap is 4 times slower than addressing physical memory but it will get your image rendered.

In the mean time increase your system physical swap size or decrease your bucket size in the Houdini RenderMan output driver. It defaults to 16 so try 8.

Great thanks ot you!
I think I will have more to study from you.
Thankyou again.