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Justin Montoya

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Rob-

 

After trying v8 through it's Beta and a 30 day trial, honestly, I just don't feel like it's ready for prime time until some bugs get worked out.  The crashes and various problems have been well documented, and that's really for another thread.   I'm sure Autodessys is hard at work on them, and when I see the changelog cover what I feel is important, I'll buy the upgrade.  Until then...  

 

Can someone please save this back as v7 for me?  Thanks!

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Same problem here, also Imager crashes immediately after hitting "Generate"....

 

yep. imager seems to be very crashy here as well. every third time i had a crash when starting up. when it works, after adding the scene and switching to a different rendering type, sometimes it 'freezes' again. i never noticed this instability as i'm almost never using this part of FZ. OSX 10.9.5 here.

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Hi Markus and R2D2,

 

It looks like you do not have a good installation of the Imager.  If you delete your current formZ Application folder and replace it with one downloaded from here, does that restore RenderZone for you?

 

http://www.formz.com/update

 

If that is not working, try resetting the prefs by going to the Finder: Go Menu: Holding down the Option key, choose Library: Preferences: autodessys -- and deleting the formZ 8 Imager folder.

 

Does that help?

 

Justin,

 

We have found one issue with formZ v8 on Yosemite (OS X 10.10) whereby clicking in the blank space of the Tool Option: Parameters Palette (if it is inside the Palette Dock) can cause a crash (and just using Tab or Enter instead of clicking will avoid the issue -- and this will be fixed with the next update coming soon).  Other than that v8 should be more robust and more stable than v7.

 

The new Subdivision Surfaces are great, but even if you don't need those, the improved Shaded Full display is quite nice.  Here's an example of the Shaded Full mode for this file, which you can easily navigate in real time for generating animations, or doing client walk-through's.

 

And here's the v7 version of the file that you can add to the previous folder:

 

 

EDIT -- this was added to the main download folder...

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I'm getting the same problem as Markus and R2D2. RenderZone option does not show in imager. I can load the file into formZ and use Renderzone there, but Imager doesn't seem to see the option. Resetting preferences doesn't fix it, though I have not yet tried a complete re-install of formZ. Since I never really use Imager I've never noticed it before.

 

Imager will run a hidden line render, but crashed when I chose all shaded full radiosity. Will try a few of the others to see what happens.

 

Thanks,

 

Doug

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Re-installed. Renderzone option now shows up but Imager "hangs" as soon as I hit Generate. Nuked the preferences folder. Still "hangs". Dialog box goes grey, but then nothing happens. System monitor shows formZ using only 1  core. Within formZ itself if I run render zone it shows using all cores.

 

Dual Processor MacPro 5,1 Mavericks 10.9.5

 

Thanks,

 

Doug

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Hi Doug,

 

Glad reinstalling solved the Imager issue.  Note that "Not Responding" does not mean there is an issue -- it just means that the program is not talking to the system at that second.  

 

The Imager will multi-process as effectively as formZ does, so there will not be a difference in the CPU usage or render times.  The very beginning of the rendering does use 1 processor, but once the Final Gather processing starts through the end of the scanning of the pixels, as many CPU threads will be used as is possible…

 

(Perhaps we should start a separate thread for comments, and just keep this one for results?)

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I will have to reinstall here as well. Same problem with Renderzone not showing up as an option. Hmm.. I hope these installations problems disappear with the next update. They leave a bad taste in people's mouths. Just my five cents.

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after several crashes at startup, the reinstallation now finally made the RZ option appear. but i'm puzzled there is no 'render progress' or anything else which signals the user what is going on after hitting the 'generate' button. one needs to look at a CPU load tool to see that the machine is rendering. a progress bar would be the minimum. a 'life' render time estimation would be better. a small additional preview of the current rendered data would be best. c'mon autodessys, we are not 1990 anymore, nowadays CPU's are powerful enough to do this without too much loss in precious processing power :D

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not sure what is wrong here, but it is rendering already over one and a half hour on my system. no idea how long exactly, but all cores are processing... gonna stop this now - seems this is way over what time should be expected seeing the other results.

 

OSX 10.9.5, mac pro mid 2010 with 2 x 6 cores xeon X5650, 2.66 ghz, 48 gbyte RAM, nvidia gtx 780 card, 256 gbyte system SSD.

 

Screen_Shot_2014-12-05_at_12.46.55-20141

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Hi Dennis,

 

Yes, we will see what we can do to add a progress bar to the imager.

 

Markus,

 

Thanks for your additional suggestions, we will consider these as well...

 

EDIT -- Markus, regarding your last post, I wonder if you are having a multi-threading issue, as we would expect your render time to be higher.  If you go to the Imager Preferences and set the # Processors to 6, does that improve your render time?

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3dworks-

 

I'm not sure why, but your memory is only showing at 800mhz.  That is really slow for DDR3 memory.  If I were you, I would pull the ram and check to see if it is rated at faster.  It should really be 1333mhz for best performance.  If it's only rated at 800mhz, your slower memory is likely bottlenecking your system, and should be replaced with 1333mhz ecc DDR3.

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yes there seems to be a multithreading issue...

whatever manual setting i use 6, 12 or 24 processsors, the program is only using a very small part of 'user' CPU potential.

 

just as an experiment, i did a fast - quick and dirty - conversion to lightwave in 2 minutes. export from FZ8 as layered LWO with textures. almost no material tweak or optimization, just replaced the default glass with a nodal glass material and added a bit of soft reflections on the stairs and the window mullions (just couldn't resist!). then i set the scene up with a simple sun + sky environment, matched camera and sunlight and rendered it with cached montecarlo 2 bounces full raytracing, medium/high AA.

 

at the same scene resolution as in imager, 5100x3300, it rendered in 8 minutes 21 seconds, included the GI calculation from scratch, which took 4 minutes and which at subsequent renderings would not needed to be recalculated. if someone wants to test this as well in a lightwave demo, if you want the LW scene, just contact me privately...

 

this is the unretouched result straight out of LW. probably the sun needs to be brighter, but thats only a rough test ;-)

post-89-0-51769500-1417802869_thumb.jpg

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Hi Markus,

 

We did not optimize the rendering of this specific file for time -- just to take a "reasonable amount of time" for the render test to be valid -- so you can get similar quality in less time in formZ too -- but that was not the goal for the file we set up.  

 

With the Imager set to use 6 processors, it is expected that a little over 1 processor would be used for about the first minute, but after that, you should see all (6) processors being used.  Is that not the case on your computer?

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3dworks-

 

I'm not sure why, but your memory is only showing at 800mhz.  That is really slow for DDR3 memory.  If I were you, I would pull the ram and check to see if it is rated at faster.  It should really be 1333mhz for best performance.  If it's only rated at 800mhz, your slower memory is likely bottlenecking your system, and should be replaced with 1333mhz ecc DDR3.

 

that's what the specs for these apple mac pro v5,1 are... it makes no sense to replace this kind of EEC RAM with faster one (and afaik it is not possible), it's part of the machine design of that time- the bottleneck would be the controllers on board, as it was the fastest at that time. however, i have never had the feeling that this would be a 'bottleneck'. even when working with 5k multilayer 32 bit photoshop files (which can take up to 30-40 gigabytes of RAM), i never have to wait for the machine...

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Hi Markus,

 

We did not optimize the rendering for time -- just to take a "reasonable amount of time" for the render test to be valid -- so you can get similar quality in less time in formZ too -- but that was not the goal for the file we set up.  

 

With the Imager set to use 6 processors, it is expected that a little over 1 processor would be used for about the first minute, but after that, you should see all (6) processors being used.  Is that not the case on your computer?

 

the screenshot you can see is taken at the very end of the rendering process. it does not qualitatively change for all the settings i have tried.

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