What am i doing wrong...

[Starberry]

I'm about to start crying, this problem just wrecks me :'(

What makes v-ray / rhino to crash in the beginning of a render? Renderers NURBS / Polys conversion to Mesh? When it does, v-ray cannot understand any of my previously used textures anymore. Rhino can render and preview them though.

Is there a way i can convert my images to another colorspace perhaps, to fix "corrupted" images for v-ray? I could use Phatch or photoshop's batching to run such actions.

I'm sorry, but i'm just way too tired and utterly frustrated to give you any more details about my computer / rhino / vray setup, i'll do that tomorrow. I've had this problem now about a dozen times and i cannot take it anymore. 4am doesn't help either at the moment...

Here's some images to elaborate my situation...





I don't know much about setting up V-ray and Rhino for rendering either, but i've learning a lot in these pasts weeks about what to do and what not to.

Thanks for ANY tips! I really really appreciate them :'( :'(

Thank you...

[fooprobe]

Re: What am i doing wrong...

Sounds more like a RAM problem. Image problems are usually: non-RGB images and/or progressive scan jpegs. This is a v-ray thing, not rhino, so rhino will be able to render even if v-ray crashes. Since you converted to BMP it's not the progressive-scan jpeg problem. Make sure all your images are RGB - even those that only use grayscale info like bump and transparency maps need to be RGB. But the giveaway is this usually crashes v-ray shortly after clicking the render button. Since you were able to render 30 boats but not 50, it sounds more like a memory issue - bad images would crash the 30 boat render too. There's a whole thread on how to deal with this, search for it. Also, what's your system specs? how much RAM? 32 or 64 Bit?

Not sure about the crash actually corrupting your images though - that's weird, they shouldn't even be open for writing, just reading, I would think.

[fooprobe]

Re: What am i doing wrong...

So check this out on the corrupted jpegs:
http://forum.asgvis.com/index.php?topic=9942.0

And this on the RAM
http://forum.asgvis.com/index.php?topic=5887.0

[Starberry]

Re: What am i doing wrong...

Thanks Emil! You kick ass! I'll check those topics out and work some more today on them, eventhough i originally didn't "want to" anymore today.

Here's some of my system specs:
- Intel Core 2 Quad Cpu (Q9550) @ 2,83GHz
- 4,00 GB ram
- NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT (though i'm guessing it's more about the processor)
- Windows 7 64-bit (Rhino 5.0 would be great, but i yet been afraid to use "WIP" version and i doesn't seem like it's rhinos problem... And besides, V-ray's not 64-bit either so...)

I guess it just fails on Runtime Error or something similar on the very beginning. Since the problem emerged, i've been more or less terrified to even press the render button in large scenes.

But the way i've understood it, Rhino (and V-ray aswell?) is capable of much more bigger and complex scenes, so it's propably something else causing it then.

Thanks for the tips mister!

EDIT: I've also been using block on this project for the first time. I insert the dock + boats as a one Linked block instance to the main scene. Inside the dock block rhino file i have individually inserted block boats, which i then copied and arranged to count up as 10, and there's also 10 inserted dock "light poles" or whatever they might be called. I hope that doesn't create any problems... I could also perhaps upload the file to somebody, if the problems still continue and there's somebody willing / interested enough.

[fooprobe]

Re: What am i doing wrong...

It's possible that you have enough geometry in that render to crash, especially if you're only running 32 bit windows and haven't enabled the 3GB switch. Since you're using linked files, try temporarily using a simple box (with the same textures) instead of the boat and lightpoles and anything else with a lot of geometry. If it renders, you know you have to reduce the memory usage - read that post I linked by micha, it's thorough.

[Starberry]

Re: What am i doing wrong...

Yes, it's definitely about the geometry. I've been testing and monitoring my renders closely for few hours now (for the first time using progress window and task manager's memory usage) and when over 3,2 gigs of memory was used, it crashes straight away. So, that was exactly the case and now i know. 50 boats (with maps and all effects) would crash on my case, but 40 would still render (with memory usage barely over 3 gigs). But probably i'll be rendering in 20 to 30 boat batches, then hide/unhide the next ones and continue with Render Window (all the way up to 100 - 110 boats), i'm sure that way i'll stay safe even with a lot of more geometry i'll be adding in the next few days.

Thanks alot buddy! Your wise words and good links (which i'm sure you used some time to look for aswell) really helped me out Emptying the TEMP folder solved the corrupt textures (WOOOOHHHHOOOOOOO!!!) and now when i know my memory limits... i can deal with it, atleast considering this project.

It's shame though, since i used so many days to model that boat again using NURBS (loosely based on the previous mesh model, which was quite rough), because i was thinking that using Rhino's interface will be much more smoother with about 30 - 40 boats (with mesh about half of that was enough to slow things down too much) and since i was also tackling with this texture / crash problem for a week, now i only have couple days more to finish the whole thing. And i'm not too experienced with Meshes, so i'll have to get by with my nurbs over this project. There's a daily job and some courses tomorrow (and thursda)y to eat my time away aswell, oh my... Well, i'm a fighter and a survivor and i shall do the best i can! Thanks you!

Nothing too pretty yet, but he's some fast renders:




Alot of tweaking is needed with textures, additional objects, HDRI background and render settings but let's see Any suggestions for suitable render settings are much appreciated aswell.

I feel so good now, i've been telling it a million times to you Emil, but thank you thank you thank youuu If only i could somehow reward / help you back with something...

[fooprobe]

Re: What am i doing wrong...

Luckily the corrupted maps post was recent - thank Leo and Micha. Otherwise I would have assumed it wasn't possible and must be related to something else. The memory thug comes up all the time and deserves a sticky or something.

Working with meshes is really critical to learn, even just learning how to use lower quality render mesh settings on your nurbs will help a lot. You can also use three different boat models, one for near, one for middle distance and one for far away, with less and less detail in each. Do you really need to see the steps in those boats way in the background? Using render mesh and extract mesh you can easily take the same nurbs boat model and generate three different versions. Or make one hi-poly version and use reducemesh to lower the poly count for the others.

Good luck!

[Micha_cg]

Re: What am i doing wrong...

@Starberry: You have seen this thread for rendering complex scenes?

http://forum.asgvis.com/index.php?topic=5887.0

I would convert one boat to an optimized mesh, best per MoI3D and than save it to an extra file. Than insert this file as block and copy this block in your scene so often you need it. Now the memory usage should much lower than 40 NURBS boats in the scene.

[Starberry]

Re: What am i doing wrong...

Thanks guys!

Yes Micha (mr. unbeatable v-ray legend), i've seen that since Emil linked it earlier (but thanks for bringing it up though). I still have to absorb the thread fully, once i have time to do so. I'll try with meshing if there's still time tomorrow / friday. Seems like there's a 30-day trial from MoI3D aswell, so i'm definitely going to check it. Very nice! Somehow the interface looks very familiar, maybe i've seen / heard about it some years ago (when it first got released?). I remember it was marketed to be very friendly towards pen tablet users, so i now have even more reason to get excited about it

Emil: Yes, that's what i've thinking too. Only problem is that i probably have to take shots from different angles from beginning, middle and end of the row of boats so let's see. But if i'll produce 2-3 different mesh boats, then i can surely replace the low-mesh boats steps with a planar texture bitmap, for example. Thanks for the suggestion!

Thanks to you both! Let's see what i'll get done before weekend...