crazy homeless guy

So, ..I am using lots of Mental Ray proxies in my scenes, and getting mixed results. I seem to be crashing a lot. I haven't figured out if it is directly related to the proxies, but I suspect it is. Anyone else having issues?

...I am thinking a clean install of Max2009 might be the first place to start.

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travis schmiesing

Justin Hunt

can you give a bit more detail on the proxies, ie polycount, materials assigned, instanced or copied.

Also some render details, FG/ photon?

Are you using bsb2?

I too can have mixed results, some scenes are very stable and others not. So it would be handy to compare notes.

I dont think a clean install is a good place to start, rather start eliminating possibities within the scene. Does it crash without the proxies, some proxies, all proxies or all of the above? Are the proxies local or on a network?

jhv

crazy homeless guy

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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travis schmiesing

Justin Hunt

Those sound like pretty heavy trees,

Have you considered changing the standard maps to A&D?
The network thing was just an idea, I have mixed, som on network some local and work well.

Is the active degragation on of off? (I find it quicker to have it off for some reason)

I get my crashes whenthe scene is being translated at render time or at photon emission. Often its a straight crash out, no warnings. So now I save before I hitthe render button.

jhv

crazy homeless guy

I have adaptive degradation turned on typically. I haven't tried it off. Typically I try to keep my trees 350,00 to 500,000 poly's, but lately I have had the need for evergreens, and old growth trees. Hence the high poly numbers.

I will try to switch to A&D shaders tomorrow or the next day, but I am thinking that is not the problem I am having since it deals more with viewport navigation than rendering.

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travis schmiesing

Justin Hunt

Changing to A&D will help rendering, not too sure about viewport though.

What is the viewport lighting and shadows - Viewport Shading set to?

jhv

Zolren

Almost every time I render using BSP2, I get a Mental Ray crash while using Distributed Bucket Rendering. When I use BSP 10 / 20, I don't get those crashes.

manta

That's really strange...travis gets crashes when using the viewport and justin gets crashes when rendering...what does Mental images have to say ?

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Justin Hunt

and others get crashes scratching their noses

I suspect most of my crashes are memory related hence why I would like to find something common in our crashing

jhv

nauticus27

Regarding the crashes when navigating around in the viewport, have you either disabled the ViewCube or installed Service Pack 1? I was having major problems just moving around in a viewport with a fresh install until I disabled the ViewCube by renaming "AutoCamMax.gup" in the stdplugs directory. I believe that the service pack addressed this, but I haven't installed it yet to find out.