unhandled exception errors

[Ruairi]

Hey guys, I am, if we are gonna have to deal with unhandled exception errors every day of our lives, could you at least change the error message to say something a little less... I dunno "technical" - like:

"Sorry mate I've decided I don't feel like rendering your image, because I don't like the lighting"

or

"Ordinarily I'd render this perfectly well, but I'm not in the mood right now. Sorry 'bout that."

Anyway, getting way too many of those errors lately. Working on a commercial, which refuses to render at all now - whee!

[vlado]

I've added a sticky topic to the bug section with the most common causes for crashes; you can add to it...

Best regards,
Vlado

[Ruairi]

I've added a sticky topic to the bug section with the most common causes for crashes; you can add to it...

Best regards,
Vlado

I'm curious if it can become a problem to keep working on a scene file that has previously had unhandled exception errors - can the scene become "damaged" in some way - Someone showed me this script recently called garbage - which reduces scene files by dumping any garbage that's built up in the scene - it knocked about 300k off the size of a scene file I was working on simply by removing redundant crap that had built up in the scene.

[vlado]

Well, the garbage seems to accumulate naturally, with or without VRay.

As for the scene being damaged - in theory it is possible; in practice, often the scene is intact. No guarantees though.

Best regards,
Vlado

[egz]

The garbage bug is supposed to have been fixed in max 7.1 btw.

[Ruairi]

The garbage bug is supposed to have been fixed in max 7.1 btw.

still using max5.1.

I wanted to upgrade but noooooooooo.

[Ruairi]

btw it seems to me that there must be memory leaks in vray - it just keeps happening that I have a scene, and it renders, but if you render again, you might get an unhandled exception, if you render again, you definitely will. It's not happening on my current scene, but it's happened to me loads in the past - does this sound like a memory leak to you?

on the current scene, it renders ok up to a point, but after the first few buckets I get an unhandled exception error (usually it would give me one before it even got as far as spitting out any buckets at all) I'm using displacement, and a fair amount of geometry, and motion blur. There's a caveman with motion blurred geometry hair using hairFX and he's wading through water and encounters a dinosaur which he thought was just a rock. The3 rock uses vray displacement (though I have the settings turned to absolute minimum, I think) - also using QMC AA and GI (I believe it's most memory efficient)

I've looked at all the standard optimisations - reducing bucket size/tree depth, increasing min leaf/face coeff, and mucking about with dynamic ram, all to no avail. I also reduced the size and quantity of image maps quite a bit. This is the most I've got rendered so far with the whole scene merged together, but I'm kinda at a loss now about what else I can do.

Also is it possible to turn OFF motion blur per-object? it doesn't seemed to be in VRay at the moment, which seems to me if it's really the case to be crazily inefficient... maybe I'm just missing something.

Are vray prox objects actually slower to render or do they make any difference to render times once they are loaded in ram...?
there's only a couple of objects I can use as proxy's, but whatever helps... Btw someone said the 3gb switch doesn't work under NT - is this true? it certainly doesn't seem to have made any difference when I tried it before... every time I get a vray unhandled exception error, vray seems to bomb out as soon as I get over the 1.4 gb ram mark...

Any ideas?

[Morbid Angel]

your cause for exeption is skinned mesh...
also like i always say: booooooooooooooleans are worst enemy too

[vlado]

As mentioned in the "crashes" thread, you may get these if you use hairfx and motion blur. In that case, copy the hair emitters and hide them, so that the copies get rendered and not the actual emitters.

Due to the 3dsmax architecure, this is a problem that cannot be fixed currently, so it will have to stay this way until we find a work-around.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Ruairi]

As mentioned in the "crashes" thread, you may get these if you use hairfx and motion blur. In that case, copy the hair emitters and hide them, so that the copies get rendered and not the actual emitters.

Due to the 3dsmax architecure, this is a problem that cannot be fixed currently, so it will have to stay this way until we find a work-around.

Best regards,
Vlado

the problem with copying and hiding the emitter is that the character is pretty dense in terms of geometry and has about 30 morph targets - a scene file saved with just the character is about 40 megs on disk, so it's very much impractical to make multiple copies of characters like that since the reason it's crashing is it's running out of RAM!

[vlado]

In that case, you can use a PointCache modifier to bake the animation to disk; after that you don't need the morph targets and you can simplify the scene a lot - which will reduce memory usage.

Best regards,
Vlado