Cineversity

I’m a long-time user of C4D and have a valid Commercial license subscription. I activated a trial of Maxon One to try out Redshift (GPU) on my new (ish) Mac Studio. I’ve been using Arnold for five years or so, but I’m looking for an alternative renderer as Arnold STILL doesn’t have an Apple Silicon-native version.

I’ve been liking the speed of the Redshift GPU, but I ran into some issues last night when I queued up three Redshift scenes in the Render Queue last night. R26. OS is Monterey, 12.6

The scenes aren’t very heavy, a city model with a few lights, just two materials. As these are drafts I’m only rendering at 960x540, .2 threshold. I’m rendering EXRs to embed Puzzle Mattes.

The first thing I noticed when I started the render was the lack of a progress bar and estimated time of completion. Is that just the way things are with Redshift in the Render Queue?

Then, at around 120 frames into a 1180-frame-render it got stuck (or something). It acted like it was rendering, but it wasn’t producing any frames. When I clicked Jobs: Stop Rendering I got a beachball requiring a force-quit.

I played around with the scene, adding a regular image to be saved (I didn’t have one initially) and reducing the bucket size to 256. I thought that might make the progress bar show up. Nope. And this render quit at around frame 70.

I shut off an external hard drive enclosure I use as it sounded like C4D was accessing them (or something) when launching, even though I’d dismounted all of those drives.

This time it got through around 550 frames before freezing.

I just migrated the project to a pristine install of R2023. This test made it through around 150 frames before once again freezing, requiring a force quit if I click Stop Rendering.

I’ve now migrated the project to my HP PC to see if IT can successfully finish this render from the Render Queue.

I guess I’ll try submitting a bug report with the Redshift log. The Render Queue log was created but didn’t write anything, presumably because I have to force quit the program every time it hangs up.

Best.
Shawn Marshall

Hi Shawn Marshall,

That things quit is not acceptable. You went already down to 256, as that is sometimes a problem, so I was told, with the Puzzle Mattes, to have it on 512.

Please check with the support:
https://www.maxon.net/en/support-center

Please have a look at some of the training materials to get a good start with Redshift 3D
https://youtu.be/oQOVQyjRJ1k

The progress bar should show. Obviously a problem at the moment.

All the best

Thanks again for the reply.

Can you confirm that you do NOT get the green progress bar/estimated time in the Render Queue when rendering with Redshift?

I’ve watched a fair number of training and intro videos, and I feel I have enough of a grasp to get started on this somewhat simple (but long) project.

I’ve submitted a ticket to support along with a Redshift log and the Apple crash log I get when I force quit. The latter mentions a “hang” several times towards the beginning of the log.

Best.

Shawn

Hi Shawn,

Currently the green bar shows up when a single render task is rendered while the specific task is selected. It doesn’t progress here. So, I can confirm that. But in the middle, there is an indicator of what frame is currently rendered.

All the best

Thanks again for your reply, though I’m not quite understanding it. I’ve linked to a screen grab from an in-progress Render Queue render of Redshift projects. I have the scene that’s rendering selected. You can see the frame thumbnail, but there’s no green progress bar nor estimated time. Is that normal behavior with Redshift?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nxc07krjj9nm27e/Render Queue.jpg?dl=0

Note that this screen grab is from my PC. I woke up this morning to find the first two scenes rendered their 900 frames just fine, but the the third item (a variation of the same city setup that was hanging up on the Mac) was hung up on frame 13 of 500 when I checked on it this morning. This happened at 9:13 am; I discovered the issue around an hour later. Clicking “Stop Rendering” locked up C4D, requiring me to kill it with the Task Manager.

What’s interesting is the Redshift log shows this line at 9:13:26:  Done (CUDA reported free mem before: 1087 MB, after: 11290 MB)

Some variation of this command happens every time it hangs up on this scene. Some mysterious “Done” command happens, and the rendering stops. No warning about memory or anything precedes it.

So it seems like the issue is the basic scene file. Is it the geometry? The lights? The Puzzle Mattes I’ve set up? The hang-ups happen in random locations, sometimes after 100 frames, sometimes after 500 frames, sometimes after just 13 frames l(ike today). Multiple computers, multiple versions of C4D (S26 PC and Mac, R 2023 Mac).

This scene has had no problems when previewing it in the Redshift Renderview nor when rendering in the Picture Viewer (stills and sequences). I’m currently rendering those 500 frames in the PV on the PC while I composite on my Mac. This will work for now, but I really need to be confident my scenes will render when queued up overnight before subscribing to Maxon One to get Redshift.

I’ve been communicating with Netinho Da Costa in support to try to work this out. I provided a Dropbox link to the scene file in my initial post.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vj4cc0963hvc8q8/Scene 1-2 City R2023.c4d.zip?dl=0

Best.

Shawn

Hi Shawn,

This is not something I can solve; it is a Support question.

I got a while ago from a colleague from the Redshift team that 512 might not work with the Puzzle Mattes; it should be set to 256 (Bucket Size), as it pulls deep data. So, it is easy to run out of memory for that with 512.

The progress bar is showing here only when a task is finished. I can’t find any data on it; what would be the expected behavior with RS3D as a renderer? I’m sure you have mentioned it to the support, then it should have resulted in a report if that is a problem.
The preliminary information you get is which frame is rendering; see the image below.

Fingers crossed, it will work soon as expected.

My best wishes for your project

Quick update: The city model I had been using consisted of over 400 individual objects. I coalesced those down to just 4 using Connect Objects and Delete. Since doing that I’ve been able to successfully render out image sequences at least three times.

So I found a workaround, but AFAIK the bug is still lingering, and I don’t like not knowing whether it could crop up again. The person I’ve been working with at Maxon Support has not been super-helpful. It’s apparent he’s not reading my correspondence in detail. I’m sure these guys are slammed, but support IS supposed to come with my subscription.

I also posted this matter under the C4D Bugs category at the Redshift forum 4 days ago, but no one has replied.

Best.

Shawn Marshall

Hi Shawn Marshall,

So sorry about your experience. There is no excuse; it should not happen! I firmly believe that any problem not solved will come back. So, it needs to be addressed at one point in time anyway.

Please open a new ticket if you feel that something is not answered correctly.

Or send the reply you have received to the email I have sent to your Private Message. I will forward it. I hope that helps.

All the best

Thank you again for your reply and generous offer to help.

The support guy says they’ve been unable to recreate the crash when rendering a sequence using this problematic model. That’s unfortunate. A few days ago I attempted to render out another sequence of that setup, not knowing that I was using the original version of the model with 400+ objects. The sequence hung up around 18 frames into the render on my Mac Studio.

So I’m not sure what to do at this point. Perhaps I could email you the link to the scene file on Dropbox and you can attempt a render overnight some time (when your computer is available) to see if you encounter the same issue as I.

Cheers.

Shawn

Hi Shawn,

Those cases are stressful. I certainly know that feeling. (Getting software here is in the early stages, and testing those. It sometimes helps to send the file to the render queue and close it, so it is pure rendering. Does that always help?

Even if I can recreate it, as long as the support can’t recreate it, it doesn’t matter. They need the data right there. Did they check it on an M1 Studio Mac? Please ask. I’m here to help with the tools, creative solutions, and workarounds. I can give you the steps I would do first (see below)
I’m not supposed to do tech support at all. My hardware is not even on the level of the Mac Studio, so I wouldn’t even be able to recreate the same scenario. Sorry.

Have you had an eye on the Activity Monitor?

Have you tried to set up the scene with Redshift Proxies?

Are all disks and SSDs fine? Do they have plenty of space?

If the amount of parts is reduced to 10%, no GI, or smaller resolutions, that would be the first part of an exclusion test.

If you use the material overwrite with only a diffuse gray, nothing else is active; does it render through?

With just one simple light source?

Will it happen with the Low settings of RS?

These questions are for you, and the support, to move closer to a solution. Not for me.

Never just start after a crash again, restart the Mac, to get a fresh system, have all (!) other apps closed, especially Chrome, which is a horrible resource trap.

All the best