Daz Daz Studio Renders Coming Out Black Sometimes When Using Manfriday's Render Queue

[timepants]

Hey, everybody. So I've been working on several scenes for a game I'm making and, in the interest of saving time during the rendering process, I've been using manfriday's render queue to render while I'm at work/asleep (same thing really ). My problem is that half the time, my iRay renders using render queue come out completely black or nearly black seemingly from a gpu crash or memory error or something. I've tested it by rendering the same image individually and having it come out fine, but when it's tossed in the queue, 50% of the time it comes out as if I added no light to the scene at all. What's also weird is that sometimes renders much further down in the queue render without a hitch. For the current scene I'm working on, all the render settings are the same in each individual render so it's not like I'm drastically changing things between shots.

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This even happens if it's the first render in the queue so I wouldn't expect my gpu to run out of memory yet. What also weird is sometimes I can fix the problem by just loading up the scene individually in Daz Studio, moving the camera in some way, resetting to its original position, saving the file again, then rendering and it'll work manually or queued. I have no idea why this is happening. Worst case scenario, I can do that manually with every scene I'm making, but since I have quite a backlog to get through and they all take several minutes to load, this readjustment alone, not even counting rendering, would probably take me like a week. Has anybody run into this problem before and maybe know about a simpler fix for it? Note: I updated all my nvidia drivers. I've attached some images for comparison. I changed nothing about any settings between the two. I just moved the camera, reset it to the position I originally had it at, then re rendered and voila. No error. I really hope someone can help me. It'll save me a lot of time. And sanity.

 

[Porcus Dev]

If it helps, there are alternatives:

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[timepants]

Well, I don't see this topic getting much traction, but if anybody's curious, I sat there and watched render queue work on multiple files and sometimes it would load a scene, start rendering, then daz studio would start clearing the scene within a minute, causing the render to fail. Don't know why it happens though.

 

[xide]

I just came across this post and can say I was having the same issue recently. I also use render queue sometimes my scenes would go black and sometimes Daz would just crash completely. I tested that it would also do this while not using the render queue and rendering manually. I think as of lastnight I finally fixed it though...What I did was open up the scene file, i clicked on defaults for the render settings, then i saved it....tested a render with the defaults, all went fine....then I adjusted my render settings again to my preferences and ran it again and it went through fine once more....so I opened all my scenes that were failing and switched them all to default render settings, then adjusted them and saved and started my render queue lastnight and as of this morning all seem to be working just fine again.

If you're curious about my render settings I typically set I usually change just the following (doing this from memory because i'm not at my PC right now)
resolution: 1920x1080
max samples: 13000
max time: 2000
update: 30 seconds
and i also enable denoise

Depending on your hardware and the quality you're wanting you may have to adjust these accordingly. I render with both video cards and my cpu.
My specs:
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970x
2 Asus Strix RTX 2080 Super
64GB DDR4

 

[timepants]

I just came across this post and can say I was having the same issue recently. I also use render queue sometimes my scenes would go black and sometimes Daz would just crash completely. I tested that it would also do this while not using the render queue and rendering manually. I think as of lastnight I finally fixed it though...What I did was open up the scene file, i clicked on defaults for the render settings, then i saved it....tested a render with the defaults, all went fine....then I adjusted my render settings again to my preferences and ran it again and it went through fine once more....so I opened all my scenes that were failing and switched them all to default render settings, then adjusted them and saved and started my render queue lastnight and as of this morning all seem to be working just fine again.

If you're curious about my render settings I typically set I usually change just the following (doing this from memory because i'm not at my PC right now)
resolution: 1920x1080
max samples: 13000
max time: 2000
update: 30 seconds
and i also enable denoise

Depending on your hardware and the quality you're wanting you may have to adjust these accordingly. I render with both video cards and my cpu.
My specs:
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970x
2 Asus Strix RTX 2080 Super
64GB DDR4

Yeah, I can't help but wonder if it's a problem in the scripting for render queue itself or something. I watched one of the renders go through the cue. I usually set my max samples to 5000 and it usually doesn't actually approach anywhere near that. I rendered a relatively light scene without a lot of characters or props and, when using the queue, I noticed the samples kinda go insane. It went from the first sample to like 100, then to 500, then 2000 then 5000, upon which time it had hit its "limit" and ended the render. This all took like 30 seconds. When rendering manually, it didn't artificially inflate the amount of samples exponentially. I can't really determine when it will happen though. Sometimes I'll do 35 renders in a queue and everything goes fine. Then I'll do 5 and half of them fail. Weirdly enough I can have 1 render work perfectly fine, change nothing but the camera angle and then it'll fail. My drivers and everything are all up to date too.

 

[xide]

Well it just so happens that I ran into this issue once again lastnight. This time I discovered it was my scene was too large. By looking at the scene you wouldn't think its that big, but it was slightly over the 8GB limit on my video card. The scene only consisted of 4 girls, a couch, and some plants and stuff....So i removed some of the plants and the coffee table which helped me reduce the size by about 1GB and after that it rendered perfectly.

Since daz doesn't really help with telling you how big your scene is you can check your log files sometimes to get a clue as to what is going on but lastnight I was using a free program called

You must be registered to see the links

which helped me to see how much of my video memory was being used.

What card are you running? Are you using the latest studio or gameready drivers? I'll try to help the best I can because I know how frustrating it can be. I went out and purchased another card because I was thinking that mine is starting to die, now I realize that wasn't the case. Feel free to message me here or on Slushe, i do spend most of my time on Slushe though.

 

[timepants]

Well it just so happens that I ran into this issue once again lastnight. This time I discovered it was my scene was too large. By looking at the scene you wouldn't think its that big, but it was slightly over the 8GB limit on my video card. The scene only consisted of 4 girls, a couch, and some plants and stuff....So i removed some of the plants and the coffee table which helped me reduce the size by about 1GB and after that it rendered perfectly.

Since daz doesn't really help with telling you how big your scene is you can check your log files sometimes to get a clue as to what is going on but lastnight I was using a free program called

You must be registered to see the links

which helped me to see how much of my video memory was being used.

What card are you running? Are you using the latest studio or gameready drivers? I'll try to help the best I can because I know how frustrating it can be. I went out and purchased another card because I was thinking that mine is starting to die, now I realize that wasn't the case. Feel free to message me here or on Slushe, i do spend most of my time on Slushe though.

I've thought it was a problem with all my memory being eaten up before, but it doesn't really explain why I'm able to manually render a single scene that fails in the queue, even if I place it as the first scene queued. I'm using a 2070 super right now, but if I ever launch my game and get enough people to support it I'll probably move onto a 2080 or whatever is a great card at the time. I think I have some form of higher mid tier ryzen processor as well, but I have cpu rendering turned off and solely use the vid card. 16 gigs of memory too, though I heard that the actual rendering process only uses video memory and not system memory. Right now I've been solving my problem by just manually rendering the renders that fail, though it's time consuming if I set like 20+ renders in a night to find that 5 failed. I'm still grateful for the queue though since it would take an exponentially longer time without it.

EDIT: I also use scene optimizer. I just got camera view optimizer too and that seems like it could help, but it's a little tricky as it deletes or hides everything that's out of camera view, which can change how lights/etc interplay so it needs a bit of tweaking.

 

[xide]

I've thought it was a problem with all my memory being eaten up before, but it doesn't really explain why I'm able to manually render a single scene that fails in the queue, even if I place it as the first scene queued. I'm using a 2070 super right now, but if I ever launch my game and get enough people to support it I'll probably move onto a 2080 or whatever is a great card at the time. I think I have some form of higher mid tier ryzen processor as well, but I have cpu rendering turned off and solely use the vid card. 16 gigs of memory too, though I heard that the actual rendering process only uses video memory and not system memory. Right now I've been solving my problem by just manually rendering the renders that fail, though it's time consuming if I set like 20+ renders in a night to find that 5 failed. I'm still grateful for the queue though since it would take an exponentially longer time without it.

EDIT: I also use scene optimizer. I just got camera view optimizer too and that seems like it could help, but it's a little tricky as it deletes or hides everything that's out of camera view, which can change how lights/etc interplay so it needs a bit of tweaking.

Depending on the core count enabling cpu rendering could help at times, especially if the memory exceeds what is available on your gpu. The way Daz renders is kinda misleading at times (this is one thing that is supposibly fixed in the beta), even if you have CPU unchecked if the scene is too big for the card it will default to use your CPU instead of your GPU which was the issue I was running into. You can see this noted in the log files. What I would also do is keep task manager open (CRTL+SHIFT+ESC) and on the performance tab I would see how much of my CPU and GPU is being used during my renders. I had noticed that sometimes my renders will start off using the GPU but then decide to switch to CPU because for some reason the amount of GPU memory a scene uses can sometimes change.

That's very strange that you can manually render the ones that fail. I can't recall if I was having that same issue or not with my scene that was giving me issues. I just know I had to delete some items for it to finally work right, but my other scenes problem I finally discovered was a corrupt HDRI file I was using that didn't get installed properly.