Error creating bitmap

[tricky]

I'm getting really fed up with this - not sure if its max or vray or me, but occasionally, after a long render to the VFB, I cannot save the image - it just says 'error creating bitmap'. I have tried sending it to the RAM player or copying to the max frame buffer but mnothing works.

The only option I have is to zoom in as much as possible and do various screen grabe on the rgb, alpha, 3 x multimatte channels, a gi channel and a z-depth channel and then tile them together in photoshop! Annoying!

This is a 4000x2800 pixel render using Max8 SP3 and Vray 1.50.00

[vlado]

It would be best to either render to a .vrimg file directly, enable the Bitmap Pager, or use the 64-bit version of 3ds Max. I didn't have to time to look into a fix for this for the final release, but hopefully it will make into the SP1

Best regards,
Vlado

[tricky]

The thing is, quite often test renders turn into 'finished' renders, so we don't always tell the rendered image to save. In an ideal world, we would tell every image to save out, but this just isn't realistic.

I will enable the bitmap pager, but could you suggest figures to input to allow things to work - we are running 64bit machines with 4GB RAM.

The 64bit version of Max does not work with file linking from ADT properly so we are unable to go down this route.

[sea2stars]

Under the the Vray Frame Buffer tab, Turn off "Render to memory frame buffer" and turn on "Render to V-Ray image file" and "Generate Preview". It'll save the file as it renders it and then you just use the command line tool included with Vray to convert it from a vrimg to exr format. If I'm ever not sure if I'll have enough RAM to save an image, I'll set it to this instead of losing hours of time.

[tricky]

...mmm...interesting...I'll take a look at that.

[Neilg]

The thing is, quite often test renders turn into 'finished' renders, so we don't always tell the rendered image to save. In an ideal world, we would tell every image to save out, but this just isn't realistic.

...Why not? Apart from a lack of space, I cant see any reason why you wouldnt - you only need the current image youre rendering to and the previous version, so thats maybe a couple of gig spare for about a hundred jobs.

[nvanherpt]

still, it's an anoying bug and it would be good to have it sorted in sp1.