topix@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (R. Munroe) (09/12/90)
I hope someone might be able to help me with a strange problem we are having with our CS-12 (headless 4D/70). A couple of nights ago, one of our animators was running an overnight rendering job (using Wavefront). Halfway through the night the render crashed - the system message said that it was a bus error. Nothing strange there - we have had many of those in the past and everything normally continues along smoothly. This time, however, we can no longer run Wavefront's renderer or any of Wavefront's utilities that have anything to do with rendered images (imf_comp, plot, tex_bld_2D, etc.). The weirdest part of all this is that nothing complains - the hardware, the software, the system software all think everything is peachy. For example, when Wavefront's renderer (image) renders a picture it reads an animation (preview) file for all of the lighting, geometry, and camera info. Based on that information, as well as a couple of other command line options, image calculates the picture resolution and renders away. Since our crash, image loads the preview file but renders only the last pixel of the last scan line! Plot, which should create a 2D plot file from a preview file, inserts NaN (not a number) in place of the expected vertices. If we use imf_comp to make a straight copy of an existing picture, the only thing that gets stored in the new picture is the matte channel. Tex_bld_2D is the only program that actually crashes. Running dbx on the core tells me that it pooped out at a program control statement (pc 0x602468) and there was a bus error. As you can see, this is a tough problem to fix because both the workstation and Wavefront's software are not seeing any problems. We have tried the same operations on our other workstations - using the same preview file - with absolutely no trouble. I have, in order, rebuilt Wavefront's binaries, removed the Wavefront directory and re-installed the software, and cleaned off the hard disk and re-installed the system software. No luck. If anyone has had a similar problem and/or knows what could be causing this problem, I sure would appreciate hearing from you. So far SGI and Wavefront are both stumped. Thanks, Bob Munroe TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation, Inc. topix@utcs.utoronto.ca