instances crashing

[j.galang]

just wondering, my file keeps crashing when I use instanciate instead of replicate in the Vray system dialog box. i always thought using instances would enable vray to render faster and render larger scenes (with lots of instanced geometry) better. but it always crashes (fast exit) when i use instanciate. it renders fine with replicate but does this not make my rendertime much slower? teh scene is almost 4 million polygons and about half of it is instanced. was wondering if anyone has an opinion on this. (weird note: the scene renders fine with an old machine(dual pIII 1GHZ but crashes with the new dual Xeon 2.8 GHz (hyper threading is off) and the dual Xeon renders fine in network rendering using instanciate but crashes when it renders on its own).

JG

[vlado]

Which VRay version do you have? What is your memory usage when using the instanciate option? Does this happen with earlier version of VRay?

Best regards,
Vlado

[j.galang]

1.09.03g. I have not updated it yet to the version you emailed me. The memory usage is sort of strange, in the max render dialog that pops up when you render it says P:1091 MB (the machine has 2GB of RAM). I am not sure what happened but it is strange that you asked me if it crashed with the arlier versions of Vray. Recently our Atlon machines have been giving us some trouble and I thought it was because they were Athlons so I moved my workstation to the new Xeons and made the Athlons just render slaves (for some reason they almost don't crash at all when I network render the same scene that crashed when I was using the Athlon as my workstation). But i do recall that a few months ago (around December last year and January) the atlons were rock solid in rendering scenes that were almost as complex as what i have now (although instances were not used that much before). I don't know if its instances or something but the strangest thing out of all of this is that the most stable of the PC's for now is our old dual P3 1Ghz machines, so now i use that as my workstation and render make the Athlon's and the new Xeon as render slaves.

JG

[DanielBrew]

(for some reason they almost don't crash at all when I network render the same scene that crashed when I was using the Athlon as my workstation)

j.galang,

This happened to me so often that I decided to investigate. I found that I could render on the buggy machines in windows safe mode and if I installed network rendering as a service. I have isolated the problem to a service that runs on login called Keyboard Express (used by our CAD department). If this is running then Max (or Vray) does a fast exit as soon as I press render. However if I kill the Keyboard Express process in task manager Max renderes ok.

It isn't just Max or VRay that doesn't like Keyboard Express, the CAD people tell me they have to disable it when they want to run other windows software. I would have thought any service which is started on login (such as anti-virus or badly written device driver) could cause a similar problem. I hope some of this helps,

Dan

[j.galang]

unforyunately i do not have that keyboard express service in my machine, thanks for the tip anyway.

JG