Render with render elements - machine hangs

[judderman]

About 15 minutes ago I added all the render elements to vray, just to remind myself what some of them looked like and hit render. The machine dies, mouse moves extremely lagged (about a 5 minute lag, literally) and I can't do much with it but force it to close down by holding in the power button.

It's stuck on "preparing global light manager".

I'm guessing it's vray, but I suppose it could be something else, though this only happened when I used the render elements. I'm using windows xp x64 and max 2008 x64. Memory shouldn't be a problem.

Does anyone else ever experience this? I'm going to leave my machine overnight and see if it recovers, the scene is basic, hardly anything to it so I'm totally stumped.

[vlado]

It probably means that V-Ray takes a lot of RAM and Windows has to swap some of it to disk.

There are several things you can do:

(*) Turn off the "Show calc phase" option for the light cache if you are using it;
(*) If you use the 3ds Max frame buffer, enable the 3ds Max bitmap pager from Customize > Preferences > Rendering;
(*) If you use the V-Ray VFB, disable the "Use memory frame buffer" option, enable the "Raw image file" option and specify either a .vrimg or an .exr file to hold the rendered output.

Best regards,
Vlado

[judderman]

Thanks Vlado - i'll try those.

Judderman.