Hard crash while calculating Light Cache

[CXStudios]

Got a bit of a problem.

I have a scene I'm trying to render, which was giving me a headache. I am preping the scene for animation, and pre-calculating the Light Cache on my new machine. I'm following the basic steps from the 'Rendering a walk-through animation' from the help index file. The calculation gets about 75-80% done and then just hard crashes Max to the desktop. I tested a bunch of different settings, as I thought it was my scene; until I tried rendering on my laptop, and it just rendered with no trouble. I am saving the vrlmap to the local drive, and not using DR.

So I'm assuming its something with my new machine, does this sound right? Here are my two system specs for info

New Machine:
Asus P5N32-SLI Deluxe
Pentium-D 3.0
2GB DDR2 PC5600-XBL 700MHZ (Patriot Memory)
(2) 74GB WD SATA 10K-rpm drives in RAID-0

Laptop:
Dell M70
Pentium-M 2.13Mhz
2GB DDR2 787Mhz (not sure what PC that is)
80GB IDE 7200 RPM

I was checking the Task Manager, and the scene maxed out on both of them about 1.68GB of RAM

Thanks guys

[jujubee]

Are you running XP Pro? Sounds like you could be running out of memory. Throw on the 3 GB switch even tho you dont have 3 gigs. It'll allow for better paging.

[CXStudios]

I'll try the 3GB Switch, but the strange thing is they both have the same amount of RAM, which is more than what Task Manager says it is requiring, if that means anything. Yeah, both of the machines are running XP Pro, as well as both having 4GB of Vitrual RAM.... just in case

I did get it to occur on another scene as well, but then later got even the laptop to crash on yet another. It appears that even tho I have 'Seen by GI' unchecked, as well as 'Generate GI' and 'Receive GI' uncheck the system still has to try and include it somehow. As in all the scene they are large outdoor areas, with large extending backgrounds with the previous GI setting turned off. Unless I'm miss understanding those settings is there a correct way to disable the GI calculations completely from indivual objects?

No that I'm comparing it to finalRender, I don't like the way it handles it either; but when you told fR to not be 'Seen by GI' the objects wouldn't even render at all, it took it 'completely' out of the equation. Which is not what I'm looking for either.

I did find a work around, which I'm sure has been mentioned. But I turned off VRay and ran just the background objects, and saved them to files and then placed those as the environment background and then processed the LC, and it worked 'extremely' fast, and didn't crash, on either system. The 'fuzz' of the LC ignored the background completely.

Guess I'd like to be ablet to keep my background on some projects, just curious if there's a way.... besides lowering my settings