Why why why?!

[biglolly]

Vray is testing my (and the rest of the teams) patience at the moment. Support e-mails are never responded to and responses on this forum, take too long to appear that it becomes. I'm sorry to rant, and I understand other users on here are supporting other users, and I appreciate that, but when you buy software you would expect that there be some sort of system set up for users to access support - just look at 3d max!

Where is the support for vray? Is there someone that we can talk to? Does anyone know of anyone in the UK that can offer Vray support, independent or otherwise. This posting a question and waiting a day for a response isn't of any use.

Anyway, our renders are randomly crashing...we were trying to render at 3000 pixels wide a reasonably complex scene. Our nodes have 2gb of ram and dual 3ghz xeon processors. We're using max 7 and vray 1.42.12

"An unexpected exception has occured in the network renderer and it is terminating". If I see that again my brain will probably implode and then explode.

We can render the scenes out at 720 by 576 for our animation...so I'm guessing it's a memory issue at 3000 pixels wide.

The only thing I can see relating to memory in vray is the static or dynamic memory limit. I don't know what this does or what we should use to get this working, or even if that is having an affect on our renderings.

Is there anything we can do on the actual render nodes to make them work better? Do we need a larger page file? If anyone has experience in rendering large fairly complex scenes at high resolution, could you perhaps fill us in on how to get the best out of your hardware and what settings we could use?

We're getting nowhere fast at the moment.

Thanks for any help.

[percydaman]

The only thing I can see relating to memory in vray is the static or dynamic memory limit. I don't know what this does or what we should use to get this working, or even if that is having an affect on our renderings.

This indeed could be integral to you problem. If you dont know how to use it, ranting in the forum isn't going to do much to help you. You might want to read up on it in the manual.

Also as its been said several times to people using the .12x version of vray. upgrade to .14, as the .12 version was somewhat buggy.

[natty]

Hi
You need to upgrade your vray ... there are known bugs in that version.
And as support goes Discreet is a huge organization, and Vlado and the team do there best to keep people upto date ,But it could be better i agree.

[gadzooks]

biglolly i also have had problems rendering something that big as well? I also would like to know! What i did was to caculate the IRmap and Light Map at half the target size, which was 1950 x 1500. Once the maps were saved i tried rendering at my target size of 3900 x 3000........ no luck, it crashes. Im sorry i cant shed some light on this matter, but just wanted to let you know that i also feel you pain. Maybe some moderator will reply with a suggestion, for the both of us. My machine is a dual 2.6 GHZ with 4 gig of ram. That should be enough horespower!!!??? Gadzooks

[percydaman]

are either of you guys using the /3gb switch? I routinely render 6k images and have never had it crash here at work.

[flipside]

I remember a thread about the static/dynamic option causing long rendertimes:
http://www.chaoticdimension.com/foru...=static+memory

Don't know if this helps. If you have memory problems you would probabely need to use dynamic option, but as in that post, this could generate new problems. Still I would try it, but with the latest vray build (.14).

Do you have displacement in the scene?

wouter

[flipside]

Five replies in 3 minutes, not bad, I think ranting does help

[gadzooks]

What do you guys mean by dynamic option (flipside).
What do you mean by 3gigbyte switch (pearcydaman).

[percydaman]

look at the above post link for the static/dynamic memory and do a forum search for the "ultimage 3gb switch thread" Its all at your fingertips will a little effort.

[flipside]

it's an option in the system rollout. Two different ways of handling memory.

3GB switch can be found here

http://www.chaoticdimension.com/foru...t=ultimate+3gb

[bojo5150]

Change your boot.ini to boot with the 3Gig switch and crank your dynamic memory limit to 4096. Also change your bucket size to be smaller then the default of 64, sometimes this helps. You can also use the split script that has been floating around these forums. Just do a search for all of this and you will find everything you need. I've been through all the same issues as you are going through now. The answers are on this forum you just need to search for them. Good luck!

[flipside]

Bojo, why 4096?

[biglolly]

Hey guys - thanks for all your responses. I am going to first of all try upgrading to .14 - Hopefully this resolves it.

I'm not keen on doing this 3gb switch thing...becuase if I mess something up, I'm going to be responsible, and we'd be a machine down. So first thing is to try .14

I had a look at the thread regarding the static and dynamic limits, but I didn't see anything specific to .14. I'll have a re-read and see if I can make sense of it.

Gadzooks - I'm glad there's someone else on the same boat! If I resovle this I'll be sure to let you know how. We have 6 nodes, each with 2 3.06ghz xeon processors and 2gb's of ram in each. I'd have thought that would be enough. I even tried splitting the scene up using split-scanline (a mere 400 pixels high at one point) but still it crashes. It does render at smaller resolutions.

[Da_elf]

i just finished doing some renders at 4500pixels, one thing that helped was to turn off the vfb of max and have vray save a raw vrimage file.

[biglolly]

Interesting. I'll try that also. I'm using vrays VFB but how do I turn off maxes? Does it turn off automatically if you use the vray one?