Frames not rendering or partial rendering

[Chadwick]

Ok, I realize that this has been somewhat addressed before but now I am experiencing this problem in animations. I am trying to do several fly-through animations. This morning when I got in I played back one that rendered overnight only to find the imaging flickering occasionally like a bad tv reception. I am assuming that some of the frames are not rendering and some are banding. I can see it when I look at the animation frame by frame. I know that this might be due to the fact that I am running the animation on a dual xeon machine - but I ran another animation on a single processor workstation and it did the same thing. Both times the model has been exactly the same. Also, I have rendered these animations before and they have worked without the animation 'missing' any frames. The only difference I can think of between then and now is that there may be more sight entourage such as trees, cars, and people. I guess I have come to a conclusion that these objects pushed ArchiCAD past its limit and therefore at times caused caused some frames to not render or only partial render. I know it seems like a weak conclusion but I really don't know what else to think on this matter.

Can anyone else verify or confirm wether this is true or not? It would be nice to know what the problem is so I don't end up with these 'surprises' in the morning.

[TomWaltz]

When you say "flicker", do you mean the entire frame, or just a part of it?

What resolution & image size are you working with?

I know I have seen some strange things with louvers and windows suddenly having a band of black move through them from frame to frame. Every time I re-rendered each frame it was still there. Finally, I gave up and Photoshopped all 42 frames 😞

[Chadwick]

By flicker I mean there is an entire frame with nothing rendered in it - just a the background color. Sometimes there are just bands of the rendering - by that I mean it'll render nothing until about halfway down the frame where it'll render a band of image for a little while and then proceed to go back and render nothing for the rest of the frame. The image is 900 x 500 with 150dpi. The thing is that when the banding occurs, from what I can tell, everything is rendering correctly inside of those bands. I have no idea why it would actually not render anything in some frames. Like I said, it is happening on both the dual processor computer and the single processor.

[TomWaltz]

Chadwick wrote:
By flicker I mean there is an entire frame with nothing rendered in it - just a the background color. Sometimes there are just bands of the rendering - by that I mean it'll render nothing until about halfway down the frame where it'll render a band of image for a little while and then proceed to go back and render nothing for the rest of the frame. The image is 900 x 500 with 150dpi. The thing is that when the banding occurs, from what I can tell, everything is rendering correctly inside of those bands. I have no idea why it would actually not render anything in some frames. Like I said, it is happening on both the dual processor computer and the single processor.

OK, that's just completely weird. I've never seen a frame completely fail to render.

I'm not sure if it's related, but do you have a recent Archicad service pack? (either 2172 or 2219) (found in Help > About Archicad) If not, it might be worth downloading and trying out.

[Chadwick]

Yeah, I've got 2172. I've never really seen this happen before either. There are bunch of ArchiCAD trees, cars and people in the site. Could this cause ArchiCAD to act this way on certain frames? I have no idea why that would happen on some frames and not the other though... I am rendering the same animation without the cars and people in the site to see if anything changes. I'll let you know what happens.

[TomWaltz]

Chadwick wrote:
. Could this cause ArchiCAD to act this way on certain frames? I have no idea why that would happen on some frames and not the other though... I am rendering the same animation without the cars and people in the site to see if anything changes. I'll let you know what happens.

I would not expect it to, but I could not say. I've rendered animations with trees, cars, fences, and all kinds of louvers in-frame and never run into something like this.

[Chadwick]

Ok - I have had the same problem again. I try to render a 1600 frame animation of the entire building, site (mesh) and some entourage of trees, cars and people. ArchiCAD renders blank frames and the quits after about an hour. If I turn off the cars and people layer, the entire thing renders just fine. I dont know what the problem is and I've searched the forum to see if anyone else knows (which it looks like no one really does). So I guess I am more or less documenting this issue. If anyone does know what the problem might be, I would appreciate any advice.

[Djordje]

Chadwick wrote:
Ok - I have had the same problem again. I try to render a 1600 frame animation of the entire building, site (mesh) and some entourage of trees, cars and people. ArchiCAD renders blank frames and the quits after about an hour. If I turn off the cars and people layer, the entire thing renders just fine. I dont know what the problem is and I've searched the forum to see if anyone else knows (which it looks like no one really does). So I guess I am more or less documenting this issue. If anyone does know what the problem might be, I would appreciate any advice.

It is possible that you are running out of memory; if you have a Mac user nearby, try rendering it on the Mac - addressing the memory under OSX is better. XP has 2GB limit per application.