a BUG ? render with empty picture

[kuzla]

I have tried to render a project in sketchup with 1.6. beta.
It was working fine, till the project became 85Mb size. Now when i hit R it only renders me a black empty picture (with no objects) Black is cause im working in night mode with lights.
Same thing if i turn to daylight... it only renders daylight with no objects on the picture.
I am using 14 layers and sometimes, when I turn a few of them off, rendering works...
I was thinking that something in one layer is causing this, but i think it is not, since render sometimes works and sometimes not...
Also when this empty picture render starts, it finishes very quickly, like it dosent have anything to render...

Is this a beta bug or am I doing somethin wrong? Is my project size to big? What could be the problem, since I dont get any errors?

[tashko.zashev]

Hi,

Would it be possible to test your scene ?
This will help to find the reason for this render issue and if it turns out that it is a bug, will report it to the developers.
You can use the support@chaosgroup.com mail and we will provide you with FTP access to upload the file.

[tedvitale]

I have had the same issue in the 1.6 Beta. Ill get one initial render done and then the next time i hit the render button it renders nothing but sky background. Also I restarted my computer and the 1.6 would crash my Sketchup on start up. I had to uninstall it all together. I haven't had a chance to re-install either.

[tedvitale]

Also as a side note. It seems to be the size of the model. Once i split it into two separate renderings, cutting each file size in half, it fixed the problem. What are the suggested file sizes recommended for the program to run efficiently. I usually have scenes that run around 180mb.

[tashko.zashev]

SketchUp has problems with very large files, in order to be sure that the issue is on our side, we would like to test it here.
Do you get any warnings or errors in the V-Ray progress window?

[kuzla]

Hi,

Would it be possible to test your scene ?
This will help to find the reason for this render issue and if it turns out that it is a bug, will report it to the developers.
You can use the support@chaosgroup.com mail and we will provide you with FTP access to upload the file.

Thnx I will do that.

[tedvitale]

SketchUp has problems with very large files, in order to be sure that the issue is on our side, we would like to test it here.
Do you get any warnings or errors in the V-Ray progress window?

No errors in the progress window. It seems to just start running like normal and then pumps out a blank background sky.

Here is the file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m8h6nw7cv9...%20Seattle.skp

[sketchupmaster]

Hi Friends,

if are you using proxy file in your scene then get all proxy Objects in "VR-Proxy" layer and turn off the "VR-Proxy" layer
and again hit the render button your render will be start normally but not including Proxy Objects . . . .

because sketchup could not found proxy file path i had many problems like that . . . . .
And the solution is DON't MOVE YOUR XXX.vrmesh FILES . . . . . . AND SKETCHP PURGE . . . . .
its work with me . . . . . .

[tashko.zashev]

No errors in the progress window. It seems to just start running like normal and then pumps out a blank background sky.

Here is the file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m8h6nw7cv9...%20Seattle.skp

Hi again and thanks for providing the file.

You can track the process Sketchup.exe in the Task manager during the render process and you will notice that memory goes very high for this scene. There are a lot of geometry so the this will brake the render process due to lack of available memory. Note that Sketchup is a 32bit application, so 3GB is the limit of what a 32bit application can use (for Win 7/64bit ).

Something that you can try, and suppose to work in your environment as well, is to render to V-Ray Raw Image and set the VFB mode to "Preview".

*Edit: you can also replace all the duplicated geometry with proxy, this will decrease the memory usage a lot.

[simoniii]

Vray viability problem.

I have noticed this same problem many times on larger scenes, say above 40MB. the sky is rendered but no objects. Its currently happening on a scene I am working on of about 50MB. I have tracked CPU and memory usage in the task manager, nothing bad here, CPU about 14 and memory peaking at about 1 GB, its about the same in Cuda, CPU and normal render modes.
I dont have any proxies in the scene. This is a pretty catastrophic problem for me and really rules out using Vray commercially.
Attached my system specs, I am using Sketchup 2013 and the most recent version of Vray RT

[simoniii]

One_door_and_cube.txtWhole_house_fail_render.txtHave done some more tests of same scene, have put building and planting onto hidden layers just leaving the front door and a cube, this now renders. Have progressively reduced the scene to this and this is the first version that renders.
Have attached the Vray progress window text for this successful render, and also for the failed render (whole building).
Have tried to attach also the Sketchup file (50MB), but am told by the uploader this is not an accepted file, then tried a Zipped version, again its not an accepted file.

The Task Manager on the successful render had a CPU max use of 95% and about 600MB of memory, similarly on the fail render the numbers are about the same, ie the memory usage shouldn't be a problem.

I then isolated all the different objects on layers, and found the problem was with the road object, once this was isolated I could then render the whole remaining scene, building , plants etc perfectly! Unfortunately this is not a practical solution, how do I economically find the offending object?
I tried rendering again but Sketchup crashed, first crash since updating to Sk2013, thats a whole day, much better than SK8.
All the renders above are not done in RT, in an effort to simplify things.

[simoniii]

I should get a life, have done more tests and have isolated the problem to one grass texture, when I put the lawns with this texture on, in an invisible layer, the render works fine. This texture exists in Sketchup but not in Vray...is that weird? (see screenshot attached). This texture used to have displacement mapping, which I think was causing SKP to crash, I removed the displacement mapping ages ago. For all these tests Displacement mapping has been turned off in Global switches.
I have tried deleting this texture in SKP but on rendering Sketchup crashes.......maybe I should compare the 2 vray progress windows and spot the difference?

[tedvitale]

I think most of this resides in a bug that is working on being fixed. It has to do with a missing texture in most cases. In my scenes in its usually caused by a missing material. V-Ray will look for something that's not there. Try adding the name of the material (open V-Ray Debug wintow to see what material its looking for, usually something like this: "In __handleReferencedPlugin for Unknown param asset::Unknown param plugin, could not find asset with url /glass_basic") The bold underlined bit is the missing texture. Go ahead and recreate that texture, and it should render.

[simoniii]

Thanks ted, cant see anything in the Progress Window that suggests why this render fail may have happened, see attached, compare the Failed and Successful renders of the same scene. (basically I achieved the Successful render by putting the offending Grass texture object on an invisible layer.
Shame if it is a bug as its really difficult to find the offending texture.