bripatfan

Howdy guys/gals,
I am slowly making the transition from Mental Ray to Vray and while the Vray looks much more realistic I am having small problems that I never experienced with Mental Ray.

One of these problems is that although my render times are fast I cant render above 2000 pixlels without Max crashing. Sometimes its a HARD Max crash (max completely shuts down) and sometimes its only a Unhandled exception error.

It has happened at both a 1.0 (2400x2400) and 1.7778 (2200x1237) image aspect ratio

The computer I am rendering to is a Dual Dual Xeon so I hope it isnt a hardware issue. Any thoughts,comments,tips would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance...

AJLynn

Two things to try-

Are you using a Vray version earlier than 1.5 with the Vray frame buffer? There was a bug that caused crashes at high resolutions, but it seems to be fixed in 1.5, and with earlier versions you can still get it to work using the Max frame buffer.

How are you doing for memory? You can monitor available memory while rendering in the Performance tab of the Windows Task Manager. Vray is pretty efficient but there are still things that can drive the memory use way up, like large numbers of photons.

FlytE

There is a thread about this in the vray forum that i started a while ago. Much of it seems to do with using lightcache, but what you can also do is render to a vray rawimg file, or render sections. Also check out this link to show you how to do the 3GB switch. I find it helps a bit:

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...ic.php?t=14564

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kippu

well a) how much ram do you have b)how many polygons are you trying to render c) at what point of time does it crash... during calculation or during rendering and i am assuming you can render the same scene in a smaller resolution... if so can you get some screenshots ...maybe its in your settings ?

can you render any other files in higher resolutions?

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bripatfan

You guys are great...much appreciated

AJLynn --I am definitely using frame buffer so let me try it w/o the frame buffer enabled and see what happens

Thanks Flyte and kippu the face count is 1,127,923 and here are the settings

AJLynn

Nothing here jumps out at me as something that would necessarily cause a crash, except for the VFB thing... what version of Vray is that? Looks like 1.47.03? 1.1M faces shouldn't be enough to kill Vray, but I see you have displacement, depending on how much of it there is you might be overrunning memory.

Chaos has made 1.5 RC available for use with the old licensing system, so even if you don't have your dongle yet, if you want the Vray VFB you could try that - but read the docs on migration because there are some settings you'd need to adjust.

bripatfan

Update:
AJLynn--Your first suggestion worked like a charm. I disabled the Vray frame buffer and rendered out a 2600 pixel image without any problem!
Thanks again for letting me know about the Vray bug, and to all those whor replied I appreciate it.