Re: Mental Ray Proxies Usability
The stuff I was working on made it out the door on time, even with the crashing problem. Actually I think it wound up looking better than if I didn't have the problem.
So, on to the problem...
The crashes happen when I am panning, zooming, moving, or generally doing things with MR proxy objects. I have tried DirectX, Maxtreme, and OpenGL. They all crash..
The proxy objects are Onyx Trees, and they are mature, so the poly count is getting up there a bit on them. I have 4 tree proxies in the scene, and the range from a poly count of 1.28 million poly's to 700,000 poly's. There are approximately 20-30 instances of each, and everything is instanced. The trees have standard materials on them, with no raytrace maps.
I am using BPS2, with scanline disabled. I am using the medium FG preset with 500 photons. The scene renders fine. About 40 minutes including GI calculations with a 1/16 Mitchell AA filter. I have no complaints there.
The scene does not crash if I delete all of the proxies, but it does crash even if I only leave a couple of proxies. I have the proxies set to only display box when not active, and to only to display 5 points when active.
I opened the scene in a fresh install of Max2009 on a different machine, and it still crashed. The machine is a dual-quad core with 8 gigs of RAM, and a Quadro FX 1700 graphics card. Not sure how much RAM is on the graphics card.
The proxies are on a network, using UNC mapping. I have not tried them local. If proxies need to be local, rather than a network, then there is a problem with the way it is set up. AutoDesk/MR cannot expect people to only render local.
I am going to play around some more, and post anything I notice.
Another note... I typically work with Max set to a 2 window pane display. I disabled both panes, so only the one I was working in was active. If I don't make an drastic or sudden moves that tax the video card, I can get a few things done before crashing.
Hence, .....I think there is a conflict between the way the video card and the proxies. I am not sure exactly what it is, but only the proxies seem to be effecting it.
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