I suck and I crash and burn

[Sawyer]

So I have these files they are oldish I have been working on them for 6 months on & off. They have been pretty stable but now they are crashing nonstop on rendering.
I have not done too much that makes me think I know what I did to cause the failures but its now pretty consistant.

So last night I set up 6 renderings for BB to work on off my main machine no network rendering. 4 jobs came back with unexpected network rendering errors one work and the 5th I cancelled because it was still going. I resolution for all was 3k wide. I tried to rerender some of them this morning withougt BB and 1 failed (even when I lowered the res to 2k) the other is rendering now.

So what more do I need to know so I can solve this?

SEPERATE COMMENT -
Also I uninstalled the old BB but on advise from the 3ds max website I looked at the registry and I see the old BB2 there and it points the 3ds max8. Since I unistalled the old backburner I get a BB error now.

[jacksc02]

sounds like a memoery issue.
try switching to dynamic memory in the system rollout.

as for the backburner problem, i cant help you sorry!

[Morbid Angel]

well if its a memory issue, he should be able to open task manager and watch memory climb before crash, however vray would give and exeption first.
If this is not the case, as being said in similar threads, merging a scene into a new scene could help.

[Sawyer]

Thanks guys - I need a follow up though -

I have the task manager open and the page file graph thing is at about 1.9 around there. I have 2 gigs of ram so I thought I might be topping off the mem but the green line on the graph is in the middle of the graph not at the top, the cpu usage has all 4 at the top and at 100%.


I have had luck merging everything into a new file but now it's the same crash.

[Morbid Angel]

are you on 3gb switch?

[Sawyer]

No I am not quite honestly there are a few things that seem rather intimadating to me and this whole 3gb thing is one of them.

[jacksc02]

what version of vray were the original files done in?

[Morbid Angel]

well....this is an answer to your problem:
when you got 2 gb of ram and by default windows xp allocates only 1.5 gb to your program, so that is why you need 3gb switch to be able to actually "use" your full 2 gb of ram. If you search this forum there are a few threads on how to get 3gb switch going...
but as to your memory climb, perhaps an older version of vray had some option which now has changed and is causing this or whatever...
If you can share the scene with us we might be able to figure this out.

[Sawyer]

I am on the most current build the files were both started on earlier builds of vray (the last build before current) and were started on max 7.5 I am now on 8. The problems did not start on the switch however.

One of the files is rendering now and almost done. I will try to set up a file to share later.

[Sawyer]

Ok I can render to small res but the larger res causes the crash. So that narrows it to the 3gig switch right?

Ok I have read what I can in past posts and I see alot of people getting blue screens associated with this.
So this is what I gather in my boot.ini file there is the line:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect/

If I add /3gb at the end I am creating the switch and I should be cool. If I am not cool I don't need to panic I can restart in safe mode delete the text I added & restart normal and be back to where I am now.

Am I close?

[RErender]

close

I would suggest you copy that line in the boot.ini and add the 3GB switchand change the name to ="Microsoft Windows XP Professional 3GB" that way you don't have to go into safe mode just make a choice on boot, You might need to up the wait time a little if it is set to zero.

[Sawyer]

Cool so I will have:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional 3GB" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect/3gb
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

and (I am thinking out loud here) this creates a dual boot I guess and if one fails I have 30 seconds to wait till the other picks up the boot

(30 seconds is the "timeout" thats where I got that number)

[Morbid Angel]

no, this will give you a menu in the middle of the boot, asking which one you want to choose. If you do nothing it will select the first one after 30 sec.

[Sawyer]

Ok I will try it.

Cheers.

[Sawyer]

Hey look at that I am not dead. So far I not noticing anything new may have to pick up more ram.