Xref

[glorybound]

I have some trees, which I am referencing into a scene, and I am seeing some strange behavior. Without these two trees the scene renders normally, but with them, it takes an hour for the slave nodes to start renderings. Is there an issue with xref's and V-Ray? My main workstation is rendering fine, and once the slaves start so do they, but it taking so long for the slaves to start rendering. I have proxies, as well, and they are fine.

[Neilg]

how big is the xref?

Didnt you say in another thread all your slaves have like half the RAM of your main machine? It's probably a memory issue.

[glorybound]

I thought it was, but when I remove the xref, it's fine. I'll look into the size of the xref.

[Neilg]

did you remove it, or merge it in?

edit: if it's the job with those trees in the foreground with displacement on the trunks, it is that your slaves are running out of memory because of the displacement.

[elivnA]

I'm having problems with Xref's as well. There seems to be some combination of xrefs, proxies and physcams that makes 3dsmax 2014 hang.

For instance:

01) Clean 3dsmax 2014 scene (reset)
02) Load in xref material from seperate max file, which loads instantly
03) remove xref material from scene, add vrayproxy of tree into scene
04) try to add xref material to scene again, takes about 5 minutes to load in(!)

Or:

1) Main scene has 6 Xrefs: building 1 through 5, and a level floor for them to stand on. This scene normally takes about 2-3 minutes to load in.
2) Loading in an Xref with around 40-50 Vrayproxy'd trees in takes about ten seconds.
3) I remove the Trees Xref again, then just add a Vrayphyscam.
4) Now when I try to load in the Trees Xref again, max starts to hang at 12% CPU usage (aka one core at 100%) for an unknown amount of time.

Loading in the Xrefs in empty scenes seems to work fine, but as soon as I want to combine things (merging in physcams when I have a xref filled with proxies present in the scene, or the other way around), it starts to hang.

Running Max2014 (no updates, maybe that is it?), vray 2.40.04 on an i7 with 24gb of RAM. In taskmanager it doesn't show my memory being full at all.

edit:

When I do it the other way around, I get the same problems:

1) open scene with 6 xrefs
2) load in xref with 40-50 trees
3) try to merge in a scene with 5 physcams in there, it hangs at 12% cpu usage again.

I'll leave this last one to chug along, see if it loads them in at all. Without proxies present, the 5 physcams merge just fine.

[elivnA]

I'm having problems with Xref's as well. There seems to be some combination of xrefs, proxies and physcams that makes 3dsmax 2014 hang.

For instance:

01) Clean 3dsmax 2014 scene (reset)
02) Load in xref material from seperate max file, which loads instantly
03) remove xref material from scene, add vrayproxy of tree into scene
04) try to add xref material to scene again, takes about 5 minutes to load in(!)

Or:

1) Main scene has 6 Xrefs: building 1 through 5, and a level floor for them to stand on. This scene normally takes about 2-3 minutes to load in.
2) Loading in an Xref with around 40-50 Vrayproxy'd trees in takes about ten seconds.
3) I remove the Trees Xref again, then just add a Vrayphyscam.
4) Now when I try to load in the Trees Xref again, max starts to hang at 12% CPU usage (aka one core at 100%) for an unknown amount of time.

Loading in the Xrefs in empty scenes seems to work fine, but as soon as I want to combine things (merging in physcams when I have a xref filled with proxies present in the scene, or the other way around), it starts to hang.

Running Max2014 (no updates, maybe that is it?), vray 2.40.04 on an i7 with 24gb of RAM. In taskmanager it doesn't show my memory being full at all.

edit:

When I do it the other way around, I get the same problems:

1) open scene with 6 xrefs
2) load in xref with 40-50 trees
3) try to merge in a scene with 5 physcams in there, it hangs at 12% cpu usage again.

I'll leave this last one to chug along, see if it loads them in at all. Without proxies present, the 5 physcams merge just fine.

Would like to add that the building Xrefs i'm using are about 7mil poly's each, with about 30 objects.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Any change to get some of those scenes in order to investigate what is going on ?
It would be much easier if you are able to provide us a simple scenes which could reproduce the same issue.

[LQ2]

I also have had problems with x-refs, but it's a Max problem not v-ray. The problems for me have been to do with the number of objects in the scenes that I am trying to x-ref. A particular case in point is when I have a scene with a Revit model linked into it, if I reference that file into another Max file, it will hang. That is because the link between Max and revit is poor since Max 2014. When linking there appears a huge number of dummy objects, which come from the Revit file. When I delete the dummies, there is no problem.

I have also looked into the problem of x-refs in Max on the web, and there seem to be a number of problems with retimers, if you have too many in a scene, it will not x-ref.

I believe the service pack 2 is said to resolve some of the problems, but it didn't fix my particular problem.

[elivnA]

Any change to get some of those scenes in order to investigate what is going on ?
It would be much easier if you are able to provide us a simple scenes which could reproduce the same issue.

I've resolved this issue. Apparently there were around 50000+ Animation Retimers on my camera's, even though I added roughly 15 of them. I used a retimer cleaner script from scriptspot. cleared it right up.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Thanks for the feedback