Lumion Support Center

Support for unlicensed users => Post here if you can't find your License Key => Topic started by: Member1210 on December 08, 2010, 09:06:29 am

Title: Rendering problem
Post by: Member1210 on December 08, 2010, 09:06:29 am
I tried yesterday night to render a bigger city scene I have imported into Lumion. The renderings are looking nice, I did some test with the sun and movement in the movie and everything looked well in realtime (around 17-25 frames per second). I than started the rendering (max quality, hd resolution) and the problems began:

The rendering time was around 5 seconds per frame what is much slower than in my previous projects but after my opinion for the end quality still quick to generate a nice movie. When I returned after a while, the screen was black because the tft was in standby mode. I moved the mouse and I saw the lumion window which was white, after around 12 seconds I could see the rendering window again showing me 5 seconds per frame. then in the windows task bar in the lumion icon writes for a short moment that lumion is not responding, then the window of lumion becomes white again and after 17 seconds the same thing begins. Meanwhile the movie seems to advance and being calculated normally, so I left the PC again. When I returned in the morning and I moved the mouse I see  very shortly 29.661 seconds per frame which changes quickly to 5 seconds per frame and continues rendering normally  (no white stops or so). I then aborted the movie calculation which lasted already aroung 10 hours (movie is 51 seconds long, whole movie should have been 2min 14 seconds). The movie is looking quite good, I realy like the rendering quality. I only have one white flash which I don t know where it comes from..

What is the problem? The screensaver is deactivated. I have the impression that the graphic card fells in a standby or so when the mouse is not used for a while. The energy settings are on high performance, nothing is set on energy saving, only the monitor goes in a standby after 0 minutes. I am working with windows Vita 64 bit, I 7 920 2.67 Ghz and a Geforce 260 GTX.
Title: Rendering problem
Post by: Remko on December 08, 2010, 10:21:06 am
It sounds like your gfx card has crashed. If you update your driver you might find your situation improved. Another reason might be that your gfx card does not have enough memory. Sadly there exists no good system for us to manage the memory of the graphics card. This means that if you have a card that does not have enough memory you can run into problems. We optimized memory us much as we can. There was a bug eating a lot of memory which will be fixed in the next release. If everything goes well you should be able to down load it this week. The bloom effect in Lumion 1.0 was rendered at Full screen resolution. This is a bug making things slower and using more memory than needed. By fixing it we saved around 64MB of graphics memory. 

The relative slow frame rates while rendering is caused by the quality improvements. When we render we boost the quality to maximum level, do sub sampling and advanced filtering. We choose this approach to get good, smooth movies.

We are looking into the white flashes. We've never encountered this during testing but a probable cause could be the driver crashing. The HDR rendering measures screen intensity and when the driver crashes this value becomes zero, making the exposure function think the image needs maximum exposure.

If your computer goes to standby mode this might be the same as a crashing driver. Standby can clear the 3D card causing it to reinitialize. We'll take a look to see if we can prevent the computer from going to sleep, standby or screensaver.

Just out of curiosity: how much gfx memory does your 3D card have?
Title: Rendering problem
Post by: Member1210 on December 08, 2010, 10:37:27 am
My graphic card has around 900 MB of memory. I have installed the actual Nvidia drivers.

By the way, I rendered the same scene in medium quality without any problems on the same pc (only 0.5 seconds per frame). 

I will try the same scene with on another I7 with another graphic card (ATI) to see if I willl have the same effect.

 

Do you think that a Geforce GTX 580 or 570 will solve the problem or must it be a Quadrao card?
Title: Rendering problem
Post by: Remko on December 08, 2010, 01:12:09 pm
Memory probably is not the issue. medium quality renders your scene without anti aliasing. The high quality mode takes 16 times more renders but the result looks smoother.

 

A gaming card is even better than a Quadro card. Maybe you can find a way to send us your scene. Maybe there's something special about it. Go to My documents and find the "Lumion" folder. You can pack the whole folder or figure out a way to only pack the models in your project and the project file. You can use dropbox and send me a message. I can also provide you with a link where you can upload your file to our server.
Title: Rendering problem
Post by: Member1210 on December 08, 2010, 04:22:03 pm
 I compromised them to one rar file about 60 mb big. Can you send me the link? By the way I just renderd the movie as stereo movie (in medium  quality) and it is awesome! Hope you will find a solution for my problem and I can soon render the scene in max quality to present it to my customer with my 3d beamer.