Cant render a large scene

[carlangas]

Hi all,

I have a large scene with about 15 buildings, which are xrefed and a lot of vray proxie vegetation (instanced). the problem is that when I try to render the whole scene the rendering dialog boxes come up but max just sits there and stalls. the system says its only using about 25% of the cpu and its only using 2gb of ram (i have 6gb). so basically it just sits there untill I kill it, if I delete most of the scene and render a building by itself it does render it but I have enough ram and dont know whats wrong I also tried checking the dynamic memory thing is the systems tab and still it doesnt work. I appoligize if this is asked on onother thread, I did search but couldnt solve my problem

any pointers anyone? Appreciate you help..

[carlangas]

UPDATE:

ok, I hit render and let it sit for a while and after 5 minutes of being in a nonresposive state it starts rendering, the rendering itself only takes about 4-5 mminutes and when the last bucket is about to finish rendering it just sits there with out completely finishing the render for about another 5 minutes. ive never seen vray do this, ive never rendered such a large scene either but I think 6gb ram should be enough though...

[duke2]

-Are you running running a 64bit OS, 64bit Max?

-Try rendering JUST the foliage

-Try giving it a flat white material (to narrow down wether its a material problem or not).

-Turn off GI (if this is the problem then its probably the lightcache, i've run into this before).

-The only other option to further narrow it down is to start deleting types, so if you have a bush in the scene, delete all of those, or a certain tree, and delete all of those. It could be a particular proxy causing a problem.

[carlangas]

yeah im running 64x windows and max, ill try what you suggested see what happens.

[peakyfreak80]

Also, I've seen this happen on my projects, but check to see if there are any Global (Architectural) materials applied on anything. Don't know if you did this, but when you import from CAD, if there's lines with thickness (in CAD), it automatically applies this Global material to it. Once that was gone it started processing right away, rather than waiting 5 minutes or so.

just a thought...

-peakyfreak