Too many lights makes vray crash?

[Bobby Revolver]

Hi guys,

I'm doing an interior (see below) set during nighttime with lots of different electrical light sources. besides the IES lights you see in the picture, there's also a subtle v.ray light placed in each window to simulate some light still coming from the street. I've had to turn off the eight spots (IES) in the ceiling or else I can't render above a resolution of something like 320 x 200.

I've had a similar problem in another interior scene, where I had to use a grey override material on everything to render in decent resolutions. So now I'm thinking it might be a problem of vray/max shutting down when to much information has to be processed regardless of it being lights/materials, etc.

I'm running 3d max 2009 sp1 and vray 1.50 sp2 on a windows xp sp3 platform with an Intel Core2 2.40 Ghz CPU and 2 gigs. of RAM.

I hope somebody can help me on this!

Ps. While we're at it, you are of course more than welcome to comment on the actual rendering (keeping in mind that the lighting isn't complete in this one). What can I do to add realism (despite upping the subdivs to get rid of the blotchiness)?

Thanks

[Bobby Revolver]

Guess I should have read the sticky first... Whoops.

Anyway, any additional help specific to my problem is still welcome

[Sascha Selent]

What sticky?

What sticky do you mean?

Besides: Looks great! I think the IES would give a better feeling for the scene!

Aaahm, the camera is a very little rolled! I think it has to be either obvious or removed! This way it feels like the column in the center is wonky...

If it´s not rolled better use camera-correction / vertical shift....

[stevesideas]

It looks more like the camera is panned to the right to me..

Im not sure but 2gigs of ram may be the cause. Im pretty sure that you should be able to render out above 320x200 with the setup you have. I guess it depends how large your textures are too. Also, have you checked your memory options in the vray setup. I usually set mine to dynamic and larger than the default 400mb.

[Bobby Revolver]

I meant "the top reasons for vray crashes". It guess it confirmed my suspicion that it's probably a memory problem... Having said that, I've never touched the memory options in vray so I should probably give that a go before buying a new computer.

oh, and you're both right about the camera (panned to the right but rolled slightly by mistake)

Thanks for your input, guys

[zeronove]

About memory try to double check its real usage during rendertime and report it; I actually use to render interior with a lot more lights (not IES) than yours without any issue; yes, I have 4gb but I still don't think that your issue is related to light! ..maybe to memory, yes, but probably you are wasting your gb in other tasks. Have you already tried using BB (an easy memory saver)? ...any info from VRay log file? ...displacement is on or off?

[Bobby Revolver]

Hey! It actually worked! I set the vray memory to dynamic and 1200 instead of 400 megs and it rendered without crashing! Thanks

[stevesideas]

Cool. Image is looking really good. I really like the reflections on the copper tubing. Its still panned slightly to the right though..would be nicer with a more square on approach.

[Neilg]

Image is nearly very good, but! The floor is far too bare for me. Get some more texture/variation/specular into it and you'll be sorted.
Looks like a mid grey with glossy reflection and no maps.

[Bobby Revolver]

You're right about the floor. I've added some detail to it now. Now I have a weird shadow problem though

I'm not 100% sure, but I think it started after I installed SP3... There's a very dark shadow in the corner on the back wall that I can't get rid of (and as far as I can tell, shouldn't be there in the first place).

It doesn't show up when I render from the old perspective, but it shows up from every other angle I've tried (see below).

I've tried turning off various lights in the scene, but it doesn't seem to affect the shadow.

Any idea what this could be?

Thanks.

[stevesideas]

Hi there. Looking good. Im not sure where the shadow is coming from. Have you tried using the override material in the global settings and setting every material to a gray...is the shadow still there then ? Do you have hidden geometry that is casting shadows only ? Are you using a lightcache or irr map that has been saved and not updated ?

On that close up, the materials all look cool apart from that brickwork. It kind of looks strange to me close up...looks better at a distance..I think it might be the fact that the brick texture has some lighting effects on it already when the shot was taken...

[Janosik]

coplanar something ?

[Bobby Revolver]

Ok. I tried using an override material and deleting all hidden objects but unfortunately it didn't remove the shadow. I'm not using stored irradiance or light cache maps... Here's my settings in case they might reveal something

Janosik, can you elaborate on the coplanar thing? I'm not sure what you mean!

Thanks

[RErender]

You don't have a vray light there do you?

[Bobby Revolver]

Haha. No, there's no light there. But yeah, it sort of looks like that! I took the easy way out and just put a sculpture thing in front of it, so now you don't really see it.