Rendering ends prematurely

A common cause is the lack of memory:

Do one of the following:

See Optimization.

• Reduce memory usage.
• Increase the amount of swap space on your system disk (see below). When your system runs out of memory during rendering, it uses the swap space on your system disk as virtual memory.

If this does not seem to be the cause of the problem, then do one or all of the following:

• Render from the command line using the -N option. This turns on the diagnostic mode and notifies you of anomalies in the SDL file’s global settings.
• Open the .out file in the sdl directory. The problem may be as simple as a missing texture file.
• Open the errlog file (Utilities > Errlog) and check for the message rendering error: exited with error code XXX. The XXX values are UNIX system error codes (not to be confused with internal error codes). The numbers come from the man page for signals (just type “man 5 signal”). Add 128 to the man page’s numbers, and you get our exit code numbers. Out of memory is SIGUSR1, and the man page says that its number is 16. Thus our exit code numbers read 128+16=144. Segmentation fault is 128+11=139, and so on.

Increase memory swapping

Problem: Increase the amount of swap space on your system disk.

1. Create a file such that its file size represents the amount of swap space you want on your system disk.

   For example, to create a 200 MB file you would type the following in a UNIX shell:

   mkfile 200m <filename>

2. Using a text editor (for example, jot) open the file:

   /etc/fstab

   and add the following line to it:

   <path+filename> swap swap pri=2 0 0

3. Either restart your computer, or type the following in a UNIX shell:

   swap -a <filename>

Some other possible remedies include:

• If the scene uses BOT files, make sure Texture Caching is turned on in the Render Globals window.

Images that don’t exist take a long time to load

The interactive package attempts to locate an image file in all directories specified by ALIAS_PIX_SEARCHPATH.

Reduce the number of directories in ALIAS_PIX_SEARCHPATH.

Rendering takes a long time

See Optimization.