VFB not saving. Please help!

[timmatron]

I've been rendering all day and I just finished. Now I'm trying to save the VFB image and it is simply not saving at all! No matter whether I try saving it as a jpeg, or tiff, network drive, or local - nothing!

I neeeed to save this or else I'm dead meat. Does anybody have any ideas?

Also, when I hit the button that says 'copy to max frame buffer' or something like that, it does nothing.

I'm using 1.46.15 and Viz 2005.

p.s. I think it did the same thing earlier today when I rendered out a different scene. I thought at first that I just forgot to save it, but now I realize that I did save it, but it actually didn't work.

Thanks

[natty]

hi Tim .....

Im afraid i dont have an answer for you but it works fine here .... i know this was an issue in ealier releases of vray

[TishoChaos]

Does it produce a file at all ot just nothing? You can try to view render it to .vrimg and then view the file from File->View Image File and Save as an image. If this doesn't help - write me an email.

[natty]

I dont think he has time to render it again Tish ...

[vlado]

As much as I hate to say this, do not use the VRay VFB for serious work, unless you are saving to a raw .vrimg file (that always works). There seem to be issues, and although we have made some improvements, it looks like it can still fail to save other formats (since it has to go through the 3dsmax interface for saving).

Best regards,
Vlado

[Da_elf]

the most i can suggest is using print screen on your image and putting it together in PS

[timmatron]

Thanks guys for all of your suggestions. However, I figured it was pretty much lost, so I had to close it and re-render it. The 2nd time, I rendered without the Vray vfb just to be safe, and now I am back on track. It's 7 a.m. and the race is on!

Vlado, I was surprised to hear you say not to use Vray vfb for 'serious' work. In the past, I had not been using it, but then when I discovered that the Max vfb would cause crashes when zooming in & out during rendering, I started using Vray's. I liked it so much better because I could actually check the w.i.p. when doing large resolution renders. I think until this happens to me a couple more times, I will continue to use Vray's because it seems to have worked 99% of the time for me.

Oh, Tisho, just to let you know, it wasn't producing a file at all. I didn't know about the .vrimg file, but will try that if it ever happens again.

DaElf - that had crossed my mind too. Have you ever tried it and would it give you a loss-less image if you did captures at 100%?

[tricky]

I am having this exact same problem, and I have had it a few times in the past. This is very problematic for us! I think Vlado should definately have made it clearer that the Vray frame buffer should not be used for 'serious' work! This is just not good! I thought I was doing something wrong or my setup had become unstable. As with the other chap, we have been using VFB as it was recommended to be more stable when zooming/panning.

I think all 'not to be used for "serious" work' elements of Vray should be coloured in red, then we know what to stay clear of!

Now I am going to have to do screengrabs of the image and the alpha and recompose in PShop.

C'mon guys - things should be clearer than this!

[egz]

We've been using the VFB for 'serious' work for the last half year without problems. There were some bugs in earlier versions (I see you are using 1.46.15), but the latest build has been very stable for us. We render everything from animations to very highres stills with the VFB.

[tricky]

I am actually on 1.47.03

[egz]

I was actually talking to timmatron We haven't had any such problems with 1.47.03.

[RErender]

I am having this exact same problem, and I have had it a few times in the past. This is very problematic for us! I think Vlado should definately have made it clearer that the Vray frame buffer should not be used for 'serious' work! This is just not good! I thought I was doing something wrong or my setup had become unstable. As with the other chap, we have been using VFB as it was recommended to be more stable when zooming/panning.

I think all 'not to be used for "serious" work' elements of Vray should be coloured in red, then we know what to stay clear of!

Now I am going to have to do screengrabs of the image and the alpha and recompose in PShop.

C'mon guys - things should be clearer than this!

Do I just take way too much responsibility for myself? I cannot understand this mindset..

anyways, did you try saving as a vrimg?.

[tricky]

Do I just take way too much responsibility for myself? I cannot understand this mindset

I don't get what you mean by this. What don't you understand by my mindset? Basically, I left a high res render going overnight - lots of blurry profiled metal cladding, hdr, soft shadows etc etc. Needlesss to say it took a long time. I came in the next day to see my render completed and looking pretty rosey, but I could not save the image. Apparently the Vray VFB shouldn't be used for serious work. The Vray VFB seems quite a fundamental and useful segment of Vray, and has been touted on various threads to be more stable than Max's own. If there are issues with it, they should be expressed clearly in the docs IMO.

[Dynedain]

Did you try saving to a vrimg, then restarting max and opening the vrimg back up to save out to something else?

[tricky]

I didn't have any luck in using the vrimg - though I clicked so many buttons I perhaps clicked something I shouldn't have done!

In the end I zoomed to 100% (which was thoroughly stable ) and did a whole series of screengrabs for the render and the alpha and patched them together manually. Fortunately my monitor is pretty high res, so I only needed to do a 3x3 overlapping grid for each, and fortunately my graphics buffer didn't fill up screengrabbing 18 x 3200x1600 images!