Ok I am on Mandrake 9.1! I will write a howto after the contest is over for seting up Houdini for Mandrake with icons and everything for DHCP connections. Anyhow I have a problem when I render on Mantra for a color pass. It will render the Shadow Pass with the Matte Shaders; however, when I turn off the shadows from the lights by setting them to no shadow and turn the shader SOPs back to their shaders and not mattes the render dies before it even makes one square. I have plently of ram. 1.5 gig of ram. I use roughly half of it during my renders on Linux. The same configuration renders the color pass on windows. If I turn back on the shadows the whole scene will render just fine but I would like to break the color passes and shadow passes out seperately because I get such a big speed increase in my render time. What on earth is going on? Is there some way I can trace the render process or is there something special I have to setup in Linux. I am not getting any errors from mantra as far as the little icon turning red with a message. I want to be able to watch the render process in verbose mode if possible so I can see what is going on.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

Hi there,

To turn on Verbose, use mantra -V n

where n is an integer. You can use -V 2 for example.

To get more help on mantra, type ‘mantra -’ in the shell.

For those on Windows, the Verbose messages do not output to the shell so you can save them out to a text file with mantra -V 2 -o path_to_file/render_log.txt

Cheers!
steven

Ok for some reason after I put a 2 after the V it started working. That doesn't make any sense to me what so ever, but it works great now. lol Thanks for the help! I like being able to see what is going on with my render interactively. I read up on all the Mantra options like you suggested.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler
:idea: 8) :wink:

Hi Nate,

If you click on the ‘+’ button of a ROP's Render Command parameter, go to the Output tab and you can turn on Verbose with different options to choose from. Each -V n will give you different level of verbosity.

Have fun!

Cheers!
steven

Thanks for All your Help Again! Yippeee yeah a couple hours after I posted that the crap started up again. Ok its Signal 11 from Mantra. It starts to render and then stops. It does a few squares before it dies. Now on some of them I was naming the caustics.pmap file and global illumination file different within the graphical interface. Well it worked fine untill Houdini just decided to stop working. So it started giving me this error that it could not find the those two file maps. So I changed their name back and set their location to the default again. So now that Warning does not come up anymore up it still stops rendering after about the first 5 little boxes have been rendered out in the mplay window. Signal 11 caught from Mantra. I turned the V up to 4 and I still can't get anymore info out of it. Anyone know what Signal 11 means???

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

P.S. This does not happen in Windows only in Linux

Hey,

Ok I am really starting to think there is a memory leak in Mantra. We are talk 3 gigs of ram used up for no reason. The render was failing to render. I shutdown the computer for like 10 minutes. Then I started it back up and instead of using 3.5 gigs of ram and swap space in linux it only used 600 megs total in ram and no swap space. Besides Insure++ does anyone know of a program I can use to trace memory leaks in Linux for non-commerical use. I don't have the money to spend on one. Unless Insure++ is free for non-commerical use.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

It's extremely unlikely it's an actual memory leak. It's a known issue with GI in mantra that it can consume *massive* amounts of memory, depending on conditions. As far as your render/it dies/power off/it works scenario, that could be caused by the interactive houdini session not releasing certain things in memory. It's hard to say. However, a memory leak is a memory leak - if you render the same thing it would “leak” the same amount each time. You should see this behaviour clearly as you test. Try spitting out an IFD and get out of houdini altogether - then render it over and over - if what you're suggesting is true, memory should be constantly climbing between renders.

Cheers,

J.C.