Top reasons for VRay crashes

[vlado]

A non-inclusive list of crash causes:

(*) Panning or zooming in the 3dsmax VFB while rendering. Seems to be a very common one.

(*) Most of the other crashes (probably 99%) are related to running out of memory; there is a page in the help index that gives some tips what to do in that case.

(*) Unpredictable random crashes could be because of CPUs overheating (we've had a few of these cases as well) and in that case there is nothing VRay can do.

(*) A common problem is motion-blurred objects depending on one another (f.e. there was a particular issue when hairfx is attached to some object in the scene); in that case, hiding the original object and using a copy of it for rendering helps.

(*) Plugin incompatibility - some plugins simply would not work with VRay properly; this may be because they expect the renderer to behave exactly as the scanline one.

(*) Crashes because of bugs in VRay itself are probably least common... we are fixing them as they are reported.

(*) Using the native Skylight light object in 3dsmax - either directly or through the Daylight system - can cause a crash.

(*) Changing the system units while the Material Editor is open. This was introduced with the real-world texture mapping in 3dsmax and is already corrected for newer builds.

If you have found other cases that crash VRay in your experience, you can add them below.

Best regards,
Vlado

[marco]

VRay 1.09r (for production work)

Unpredictable non-reproduceable random crashes when rendering animations on Dual HT Xeon systems.
single cpu HT systems or dual (non HT) P3 systems render fine.

Vlado, I can remember a thread where you mentioned that you found a hyperthreading-related bug which might cause these crashes ?

Marco

[vlado]

VRay 1.09r (for production work)

Unpredictable non-reproduceable random crashes when rendering animations on Dual HT Xeon systems.
single cpu HT systems or dual (non HT) P3 systems render fine.

Vlado, I can remember a thread where you mentioned that you found a hyperthreading-related bug which might cause these crashes ?

Marco

Yes, but this is fixed in the latest builds.

Best regards,
Vlado

[pshupe68]

running out of memroy errors, you say there is a page in the help index. Is that in the help index for VIZ or is there a Vray help index somewhere. There is an "additional help" area of the help which most of the plugins, with the exception of Vray, have help files.

Please clarify. Thanks.

Regards Peter.

[sany]

Under Vray Docs in the support section of this site there is an online help file which contains a troubleshooting section this will explain further.

[Ron Martin]

Random freezes of single Buckets

I have a simple scene with a vray dirt material in the diffuse and self illumination slots to render an ambient occlusion pass. No lights. At rendertime one bucket after the other freezes ramdomly. The other buckets continue and maybe or not, freeze too. With luck a selected region is rendered without errors.

One of the objects has a vray displacement modifier on it.

To get out of this i have to kill max!


?

[vlado]

Are you using 64-bit 3dsmax 9 with 2d displacement?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Ron Martin]

Yes.

[mike_kennedy]

The Material editor is like playing Russian roulette for us, crashes randomly about every 5 or 6th time we open it. I have to use a material clearing script to clear it before I open it, real PITA

[vlado]

It is odd as this has not been mentioned so far; do you use the "Show maps in viewport" option for V-Ray materials? If so, try to disable them and see if it helps.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Aldaryn]

Ditto here. But only after we switched to max2008. Really, really annoying. Upon Material edittor open, harddrives go insane, and sometimes a crash occurs. Russian roulette semblance is very fitting. I think this might be related to maps as well, since having shaders with large maps in the editor tends to khm, put more live cartridges into the revolver.

(max 2008 64bit on 64bit XP w q6600 and 4gigs ram)


Best regards,
A.

[jodestroy]

We often crash during the 'Building raycast Accelerator' phase. we encounter this on at least 50% of our scene from simplier to complexes ones. We have 4Gb ram and dual Xeon so I don't thihk it's a Ram lack.

we found that the problem was caused by a ramdom corrupted geometry. when we face the problem, we need to find it by hide object, render, crash. It's very annoying. when we found it, we delete it and the render works fine.

Somebody facing the same issue?

[Mats_O]

I am running Max 2009 with latest VRay on a Vista Business, 32-bit, 4 GB RAM, 2,4 GHz HP Mobile Workstation. Crashes all the time now while rendering and I am about finalizing a project with tight deadline...

About the booy.ini, the help file talks about Win XP only, can I change Vista so tha Max can use more memory? How much should it use? Can´t find the boot.ini file, where is it?

Problems occured after installing Mudbox 2009, don´t know if that is just an coincidence.

Thanks in advance!!

[Da_elf]

windows vista. ewwww. try XP64

[alfabeta]

My top reason for v-ray crashes is probably 3DsMax

Mike_kennedy:
"The Material editor is like playing Russian roulette for us, crashes randomly about every 5 or 6th time we open it. I have to use a material clearing script to clear it before I open it, real PITA"

What script is this? Material editor is our biggest pain by far. I want a V-ray ME that by-passes the Max ME!! Think it is horrific that nothing has done with the ME since... Max 4 or something?!


/Chris