Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

[tsubiaddict]

Morning all,

I am doing a large render, having come in this morning it seems sketchup crashed...upon opening any sketchup file and just trying to add a simple material.....say red_brick_ worn from the Vismat download section I get a windows error box...continually popping up saying windows No Disk please see attached JPEG for screen grab!

Any Ideas....I have uninstalled...and re-installed.... I have opened a black file and tried to apply materials... nothing always crashing when rendering in the update section....

Kind Regards

Mat Best

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

Apparently you're hard drive has said that it's had enough and decided to take vacation...(sorry I had to do it...I'm in a weird mood this morning)

To be honest, I'm not really sure, but I would say that you should restart your computer. Chances are that if you've been doing a lot of large res work, then you've got a bunch of leftover crap is hanging around memory. It could also be that the texture is somehow corrupt or something, but those are my two guesses.

[tsubiaddict]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

Dalomar,

Spot on after re-building a model and creating my own textures a 5000 pixels render has come out sweet! Seems to be the materials I downloaded from the library are corrupt....the maps are 5mb etc and these seem to be causing my CPU some problems when applied within a scene.

Note to others... may take longer to start with but make your own materials! save hassle in the end I promise you!

Thanks again young man. All sorted.....and have a great vacation, me in work again! this render won't build itself.....or will it!?!

Mat

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

Those materials were made in Rhino, and now that I think about it, possibly some sort of prerelease/internal build (not the smartest I don't think). That might be causing the problem with the material itself. The textures should be fine though. The were originally 2-3 times bigger than what actually wound up being packaged with the materials. The are pngs which are a good format, but generally bigger than jpgs. So maybe a quick change of format in ps would help.

[tsubiaddict]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

Once the file formats have been changed and even re-sized it seems to crash the material studio upon importing..... I will continue to work on this and post any findings.

[tsubiaddict]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

Without a doubt is it the size of the maps which are causing the Windows - No Disk error!

I was lovingly sent a Landscape Architects scheme with his materials applied.... file size 150mb! 140mb of this is the textures.....he has since been scratched off my Christmas card list and recieved a virtual black eye!

My advice is work in the texture in PS and save as, think about the visual you are attempting and always think scale.... a small file size, which can afford to lose some detail will be ok on a aerial view....where alot of the texture maybe seen.... however you may see fit to have a detailed texture if you zoom in if this is the case, maybe its better to just apply it for each view then delete when finished??? maybe the pro's can inform me more on this!

Hope this kind of helps, its been doing my nut in!

M

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

Well, hate to break it to you on this one, but you can thank SU for you're texture fiasco. The way SU actually saves textures is not to keep them relative but to actually "embed" the texture within the mesh itself. IOW rather then the geometry simply saving vertex/face info and the texture coordinates, the geometry is actually saving the different parts of the image on a per face level. This means a whole lot bigger files (like 140 mb bigger), a whole lot more memory being used up (which is probably the cause of the crash), and the scene geometry being much more intensive for us (vray) to work with. Just thought you might like to know some of the fun things that come along with SU...the grass isn't always greener ;D

[thomthom]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

Well that explains why my neat little model which was about 1.5MB a couple of days ago has suddenly grown to 18MB! Two days ago I started to add some textures to the model.
I've been hunting for hidden geometry for ages due to the sudden file-size increase. *smacks head*

[tsubiaddict]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

Thom,

I was able to render a file size at 27Mb with some pretty intense materials...

however when the landscape architect gave me his 145Mb file and I cyber slapped him that puppy crashed immediatley....

My other advice, is duplicate a few files now and again, as once your PC runs out of memory and crashes it forgets all the material attriubutes so you have to go through and remake materials then re-apply... there may be a quicker way however this is what I found.!

Good luck... I tend to be dealing with large files now so if I figure out anything else out I will post.

M

[thomthom]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

Aye! I'll sign up for notification for this thread.

I've often had to work with models which 3-4 architects has worked on before me. Often they are heavy with extra needless geometry. Not uncommon to be 20-30MB, which I usually manage to trim down to 5MB or so. I thought that it was the polygons that mostly made up for the SU-file's size.

When you say that SU forgets material attributes when I crashes, would that be if you've positioned or scaled the materials? So when you reload it resets the textures to their default positions? Or does it purge all the materials from the file?

What specs are your computer? CPU, RAM, and GFX card?

[tsubiaddict]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

The file forgets all material properties, best way to explain it is if there is Glass in the scene made in Vray and applied, when you hit update after the crash in material editor there is no glass there, Just a square block with no distortion or reflection.... I have found this a a few models.... I always create a back up when applying a few textures and also if you bring components in on-mass cars, lamps etc... this is another example of Vray having a strop with the amount of materials....I can only speak from experience.

Processor: Intel Duo Core CPU 3GHz
RAM: 3326Mb
Graphics Card... hmmm got me there... a work PC.. I hear that a good card will make it quicker to work when you have a large clunky file, although it won't help when coming to rendering... etc.

[thomthom]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

Ah, I see now. I thought you referred to the SU materials.

It seem to be somewhat strange how SU-VRay deal with materials. Wish components could be imported with pre configured VRay materials.

I noticed another odd thing with VRay and materials. When I went to rename a material I've applied to quite a few objects the computer was working for about 5-10 mins before I could use SU again. I nearly thought it'd crashed.

My specs are Intel Core Duo 2, 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, nVidia Quatro 3500.

So V-Ray doesn't use any of the calculation power of the graphics cards?

[tsubiaddict]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

I believe so, I could be wrong the pros may be able to tell us/you more... I am sure there is a thread somewhere I can't find it at the mo!

Will keep you updated on anything else I come across!

M

[tsubiaddict]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

oo graphics card is Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS ...what ever that means -- tried to get work to ump it up! dont think they will though! >

Muhahaha I have my ways!

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Vray Material Editor - WIndows No Disk Error -- Please Help

the graphics card isn't used for anything other than SU viewport stuff. We don't use it to process anything, be it while you're working or during a render. Very few softwares actually use the GPU for anything but viewport display.