Max keeps crashing while trying to render

[ksgfx]

And not just a normal max crash. It just closes without warning and up pops the Autodesk report box. Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way, I hope some of you who are more experience with this sort of thing can help me.

Here's the details.

I'm rendering a scene that is bascally a department store full of fixture with clothing on them. The client has requested very specific clothing so I have created racks of different clothing at as low of a resolution as I could get away with. Now because there is about a hundred racks or so of this clothing I thought I would use vray proxy for the clothing (the fixtures aren't to mesh intensive and the client likes to swap them around). I then created put together all of the different quadrants of the store. I can render these quadrant (just on white with 3point lighting) just fine. But once I put all of the quadrants in the store it crashes when it reaches the Building Light Cache stage. The store is lit by about 50 lights with a mix of IES and Photometric point all with vray shadows on.

Here are my settings.




So, am I approaching this wrong? Is this just too much for 3ds/vray to handle? Any thought on how to proceed?


Thanks for any help, my boss and my sanity appreciate it.

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[ksgfx]

I also just tested it with just using the straight clothing and not v-ray proxy and it still crashed. I can also get it to render if I remove all of the clothing and just render the fixtures.

[DaForce]

Sounds like your just running out of memory.

Open up windows task manager CTRL SHIFT ESC and watch 3dsmax.exe memory usage up to the point it crashes.
If it gets over 1.7gb (or thereabouts) it will crash unless you have the 3gb switch setup.

[ksgfx]

Thanks for your quick reply. The folks here are always so helpful

On a 64bit machine with 4 GB of ram it shouldn't have the 1.7 problem right?
I just watched it and it crashes at about the 1.2gb mark, so it's not even making a dent in the RAM.

I do have to seem more luck when I lower the light cache way down to less than 100, maybe too many lights + too much geometry + too high of light cache = plasma core overload.

[DaForce]

64bit machine, assuming your using 64bit max and 64bit vray. If thats the case then that is very odd.

Try switching to dynamic memory and setting sit to say 900 or so.. just play with that amount see if it makes any difference.

[vlado]

If you are still getting it to crash, you can try to send the scene over to vlado@chaosgroup.com (if it's too big we can provide you with space on our ftp server to upload it) so that we can have a look here; it doesn't sound like memory is your problem, but I'm not sure what else it can be without looking at the scene.

Best regards,
Vlado

[ksgfx]

Unfortunately untill the project is released I can't show or send any copies, but I really apprecitate the offer Vlado. Here's where I'm at with it.

Using dynamic memory did work, albeit very slowly, but it renders. I also did some searching around the boards and found a few people having issues with displace. I turned off displace and now it renders fine. So I'm thinking its a displace vs. light cache problem. Is there any other solution for this besides turning it off?

[percydaman]

Ive found that Lightcache beyond a certain poly/memory count, just becomes unusable. vray's micropoly displacement adds ALOT of poly's at rendertime, which then of course creates problems with lightcache.

[ksgfx]

So would you recommend switching to QMC then? I'm really new to using vray for archviz and through browsing the posts here it seemed that light cache was the best to use.

[jean-piere]

hi ksgfx

i am having a similar problem since switching to max9 vray1.5,

never had the problem in max7 vray1.4

I was wondering if you found a solution

[priad]

It seems that I have also this problem humm strange crashing with max9 and 1.5RC3

[priad]

displace displace displace that's my problem, on two scene displace crashing max, anyone else have this problem?

[DaForce]

YOur probably running out of memory cause the displacement is sucking it all up.

Are you using 2d or 3d? try switching.

[jean-piere]

i found that the 3GB switch helped my problem a bit,
still crashes but not so often.

only have 2gb of Ram , will get 4gb

considering that the main machine is the one that needs to hold the image buffer will it be ok if the DR slaves have only 2GB and the main 4GB

Thoes that make sense ?

[vlado]

considering that the main machine is the one that needs to hold the image buffer will it be ok if the DR slaves have only 2GB and the main 4GB

This is correct, yes.

Best regards,
Vlado