Render gremlins

[YoyoBoy]

I've been losing my mind the past few days just trying to get one long camera move rendering at a reasonable time. All sorts of bizarre things have been making me pull my hair out:

1) What would cause VRay 2.5 to get hung up for hours on anything metallic when creating an irradience map? This is happening just as I've finally got everything else in the scene rendering very quickly.
2) I also had some weirdness last night where Brute force was not rendering direct light, only bounced.
3) There was one point where things were looking okay, I made a tweak and the renders that followed had nothing to do with anything in my scene or the camera view. It got better. Somehow. But has anyone else experienced that?

Thanks

[Svetlozar Draganov]

All those issues seems very very strange.
Can you send us a scene about the issue with Irradiance Map and metallic surfaces?
Does the second and third issue still exist, or they disappear when restarting 3DSMax?

[YoyoBoy]

The scene and all its xrefs and such amount to about half a gig, so I'd like to avoid sending it, if I can. It might be good for me to mention that the file that I'm rendering is rather light, but it x-refs in one big scene and a few other objects and VRay Proxies. That way Autosave doesn't drive me up a wall.

#1) I suspect this has something to do with SolidRocks settings, but I'll see if I can make it happen again. In my panic a few days ago, I was finally able to get around it using just normal VRay factory preset.
#2) This is still happening, however it does not occur when I render the scene in Max 2015, only when I render it in 2014 (the render farm I'm using hasn't upgraded yet).
#3) This was just a weird fluke I think (a cyan and/or black blob against red and maybe some other colors). I have not been able to reproduce it, but it sure is a frightening thing to see at 4 am.

When you do archaeology-related work like I do, you sometimes encounter ancient curses that keep you from meeting your deadlines. ~P

[paolo242]

I think SolidRocks does not change the settings in the xref...

[YoyoBoy]

I get the same results if I merge the main scene into the scene with the camera and lighting, so I don't think SR's inability to tweak xref materials is an issue.

I just sent the files to support@chaosgroup.com.

[tashko.zashev]

I get the same results if I merge the main scene into the scene with the camera and lighting, so I don't think SR's inability to tweak xref materials is an issue.

I just sent the files to support@chaosgroup.com.

Thanks, we will check your scene and reply to you shortly via our ticket system.