render crashes after pre-filter

[dynaman]

this is frustrating!! i have been finding that almost every scene i have tried to render since upgrading to vray 1.5 crashes after the pre-filter stage of rendering. small previews render fine (800x pixels), but when i go to render at print resolution (5000x) all my scenes crash.
OK, maybe not all, but enough that i am now completely paranoid about rendering at print resolution. i would say it happens to about 75% of my scenes.

my scene setups are pretty typical, IM / LC, no caustics, just standard architectural rendering.

so far i have found some workarounds by starting a brand new scene, merging all the geometry in, and setting up the environment again, but i don't trust that this is going to work.

what is the deal?

[vlado]

What is the memory usage at that point? Have you tried turning on the 3ds Max bitmap pager or writing directly to a raw .vrimg file from the V-Ray VFB?

Best regards,
Vlado

[dynaman]

i do have the bitmap filter on, i also have the raycast parameters set to dynamic. sometimes it helps if i re-start the system. also find that i usually get crashes if my scene has more than a few 3D trees in it.

i don't render to .vrimg and i haven't been using the VFB since 1.47 and the inevitable crashes that would occur at that time. is it more stable now?

btw, the scene that was giving me trouble last night ran OK after restarting my system. the last file that gave me major problems was a very simple scene where i was rendering about 12 trees in a separate pass with all the building geometry matted out using vray material wrapper. i had to abandon it in the end and use 2D trees composited into the image because the scene would crash every time. the leaf materials had an opacity channel, could this have been causing an out of memory problem?

i'd love to hear some suggestions. i really need to solve this problem so i can literally sleep at night.

[vlado]

I meant bitmap pager, not bitmap filtering; in any case, your problem seems to be lack of enough RAM space, so any of the tips for reducing memory usage or expanding the memory available to 3ds Max in general will help you (e.g. using .vrimg files while keeping the 3ds Max resolution small, moving to a 64-bit version of 3ds Max and V-Ray, using the /3GB Window switch etc).

Best regards,
Vlado