Vray 1.5 RC2 crashing Max

[teabag]

Hi,
I am having a strange problem with my scene.
Vray crashes my scene, sometimes during LC calculation, sometimes in the mid of IRR calculation.
I am trying to render scene at 1700*1200 res, some 3d displacemnt, some proxies.
i do not get any error message from vray, i just have this standart max send report window....

Any suggestions?

[teabag]

when i check report missing files in vray log i get few lines like this:

warning following files missing:
warning: "C:\" referred by "Cha"
warning: "D:\" referred by "Cha"

but D is my dvdrom drive....thats strange

i am running win 64bit

[teabag]

do you think this could be cause by missing simcloth dll?

[mdi]

normaly (well in my experiance anyway) when max just crashes without any warning its a memory problem.

things i do to sometimes fix the problem...

render to file with the vray frame buffer (turn off render to memory buffer, turn on Generate preview)
lower bucket size
turn on Dynamic memory (I not sure where this is in the new build)
merge everything into a new scene and start again.
I had a problem not so long ago when I had one simple model that was causing the render to crash instantly...I found the model and deleted it, rendered fine after that.

Im sure you have thought of most of these though, good luck!

[teabag]

ive ran memtest which is a standalone app running from bootable cd:

not only it just allocates and tests only 3326 megs of ram, but i go over 6000 errors on my ram ))))))

anyway...do u think that vray can crash like this due to bad memory?

[vlado]

anyway...do u think that vray can crash like this due to bad memory?

Of course; otherwise it won't be "bad" memory.

Best regards,
Vlado

[teabag]

)) now i look like an idiot vlado )) hehe...cheers.

[DaForce]

take out a stick and drop it back to 3gb, sounds like your mobo cant handle 4gb properly and thats why its giving errors. Also make sure you are running the latest bios for your motherboard

[teabag]

that was my problem eve though intel says its mobo can handle 4gigs, it actually doesnt, so i had to have the mobo changed, now i am getting 965 chipset and the technician said it worked just fine, addressing 4gigs and no errors with memtest.

so the conclusion is:
not all the mobos supporting up to 4 gigs can actually support this,
some of the mobos have problem supporting double sided 1gig memory sticks

thanks guys for help....now i cant wait to get my comp back and try rendering the scene again....hopefully it wont crash

[teabag]

right...so i changed the mogo, memory, everything......memtests went fine.......and its bloody crashing.....sometimes during light cache calc, sometimes during IRR calc.

i got 4 gigs of mem, usage at rendertime is aroung 2,2 gigs...

i dont know i seriously think this is gonna be vray bug...

[DaForce]

hmm odd.

Ok, when it crashes what happens exactly?
Any vray log errors? does max just disappear? does max say that it has to close..etc..etc.?

[teabag]

vray doesnt give any errors...
max closes and gives me send report window (unhandled exception)

ill try to render again and look in the vray log for the bug

[Adam H. Stewart]

Frame Stamp

Are you using the Frame Stamp ? - I think I have identified a bug that cause Max to crash when using Frame Stamp with text that will exceed the length of your frame. Max hangs for a second ( as if it is having an issue saving the file ) and then goes belly up.

[vlado]

Such random crashes may indicate a hardware problem. Please check your CPU temperature and RAM chips for errors, just to make sure it's really a software issue.

Best regards,
Vlado

[DaForce]

FYI we have been talking about it over PM.

Turns out the 3d displacement / light cache combo was blowing memory thru the roof.
After changing alot of the displacement to 2d, and tinkering with a few settings, and fixing up the C:\ issue..etc..etc. I believe he is rendering fairly happily now.