element 3d render issue

[bennettes58638900]

Hi all,

  I've been trying to find out why my video render is coming out with such a weird error.  Hours looking at forums so far, and no luck.  I have a fairly simple scene that is doing just fine in the preview window at quarter and third resolution settings.  However, when I send it to Media Encoder, to render to h.264 in 1080p (which is the comp res), the encoder is generating random frames of my mask layers that i used to extrude the element object, and nothing else.  This is also what happens in the preview window when I set the resolution to full.  To hopefully narrow this down: I don't have any layers toggled on as guide layers, and these layers aren't even live until 00:02:00, they're hidden, and they're showing up in the output in the first few frames.  It seems like the encoder is just freaking out and giving up or something - the encoding should take a lot more time, and once it gets to the complex scene, it just stalls on a frame for a minute, then squirts out a bunch of errant frames and finishes in no time.

My computer is a late 2012 macbook pro, fully loaded, with a Nvidia GeForce GT 650M with 1gb of VRAM.  I don't know if that's it, but I also updated the CUDA driver, as well as reinstalled Element 3D and After Effects.  Same issue after all that.  Additionally, I tried encoding to different settings and resolutions, with no difference.  I know I don't have a lot of VRAM compared to newer machines, but I've rendered much more complex things on this before.

rendering at quarter resolution.

why...?

[Rick Gerard]

Element 3D does not use CUDA acceleration, neither does the AME. You are using Classic 3D so there should be no problem.  As long as you purge everything you should bet a clean render.

I have no idea what is going on in the comp at 11 or 24 seconds because the only thing in the screenshot is an audio layer and a nested comp. What is going on in the nested comp (pre-comp)? Check the modified properties of the layers giving you problems (press UU) and if you can not figure it out then post a screenshot that shows us what is going on in those layers.

If you are only having problems with the frames in the nested comp try adding Pre-comp 2 to the render cue, pick the Lossless with Alpha preset and render and replace in your project.

The first rule I have with complex scenes is to make each shot a separate comp and simplify as much as I can. If the render is going to take more than a few seconds a frame I render an image sequence because it is a lot easier to fix. Really complex comps are almost never sent to the AME directly to render an MP4 for distribution because complex composites can take a very long time to render and seriously tax the AME and AE running in the background. I almost never assemble a sequence in AE using nested comps as separate shots because it's just a lot easier to handle the rest of the post process in an NLE.

I hope these suggestions help. If there is nothing wrong in Pre-comp 2 rendering and replacing should fix the problem.

[bennettes58638900]

Hi Rick,

  First of all, you frequently answer these and generally speaking, I've found your advice to be sage, on point, and generally is trying to shed light on best practices.  For this I thank you.  What I found when I rendered small pieces is that, like you said, I could try to see what is happening in each frame when this occurs.  I don't think I know what the cause is, but for some reason, if I altered the positions of the objects a negligible amount, they'd show up in the frames.  Would you have any idea why this is?  Could I be doing something better?  I have preview mode on, but I have objects that will look crappy unless I'm bumping up supersampling a notch.  Again, thanks so much.

Bennette

[bennettes58638900]

I mean, the objects were there just like they should be, and on seemingly random frames, just disappear and come right back two frames later.  No keyframes, nothing special about those frames.

[Andrew Yoole]

Simply re-iterating Rick's advice, for clarity:

Clear your cache before rendering.

Render from the Render Queue, rather than in AME.

Does this fix the problem?

[Mo Moolla]

Hi

i would recommend as a test:

1. Render out in a 720p format out of AE (to save time)

2. Render the same using ME

i am almost positive rendering out of AE directly will solve this issue.

You project is clean. Track Mattes look good. Nothing too complex which would cause this issue.

only one problem I can think of that might cause this, well actually 2.

What bpc are you working at? Use 8 if you aren’t

Whats your AA set to in E3D?

Mo

[bennettes58638900]

Hi Andrew,

   Thanks, and yes, I did both of these things.  It looks to be an element issue, I think.  Either that or my computer is getting too old to do this stuff.

[Mo Moolla]

Are u on a retina or ore-retina MBP?

If Retina the spec would be up to par with 8-18gig RAM

Non retina....hmmm time to upgrade

Check the video copilot blog page

I will forward your query to Andrew Kramer at VC

Will update u when I can

Mo

[bennettes58638900]

Hi Mo,

   I'm on a retina MBP, late 2012, 8 gigs of RAM.  In all honesty, I am pretty blown away that my old macbook is still getting along great for the most part, and I'm looking at new ones, just wasn't planning on upgrading just yet - I don't do animation for a job, at least now.

I had problems logging into the VC forum, otherwise I'd be there (already sent an email to get my login sorted out for it, for some reason the forum account and my VC account don't have the same creds and I haven't been on in a while).

I'm working in 8bpc, and I'm keeping multisampling and supersampling at 0 until I can figure out how to get this thing rendering correctly.  No AA smoothing applied or anything (I hope that answers your question, although I'm a bit of a novice with that).

[bennettes58638900]

Here are the layers I'm using - not many, although the "SM" model has multiple extruded parts, and a plane with a stone shader and bump.  The two other E3D shapes (car and ball) are somewhat complex imported .obj files.  The two precomps are just the toy car, the ball, and two spot lights.  Again, the whole thing renders and plays in 1/4 res, just with the UFO's popping in and out.

[bennettes58638900]

Oh, and you can disregard the "piece" layers, those are just lossless renders from directly from AE I'm using in place, but I just rendered and put those in.

[Mo Moolla]

Looks neat and tidy.

1. Whats the timecode at the points where the mask layer is rendering out?

Set your render area bar 2 a few secs before and after that time and render out using AE not ME

Turn off RGB+Alpha. Just choose RGB and ,millions of colors

Send out in a 720 res first and click resize quality to high.

Test 2: Change to 16 bpc and do the same a above

Tell me what u see on both plz

[OussK]

Elements 3d render only on GPU, and it's related directly to texture size and as you mention you have some texture, shader  and bump map, so may your texture are very hight resolution and this block your GPU from reading the full resolution because your small VRAM,

so try to remove the texture and do a render test, or try to scale down this texture at least.

[Mo Moolla]

Agreed turn down the texture settings