It turns out that (I think) it was an issue with the scene itself in that the focal length of the Vray camera was supposed to change during the animation sequence. So I redid my camera moves with the same focal length for the entire sequence and that seems to have fixed it. So I don’t know if that’s a bug, or if you generally can’t do that.
Let me check if the crash can be reproduced here.
Anyhow, single frames that were taking about 23min with 2014/2.4 are now coming in at around 6:15ea with 2016 and 3.22. I’ve put out about 100 frames so far overnight, and I am absolutely blown away by the performance, especially how fast pre-passes are! Thank You!
Thanks for sharing your render results. Lot of work has been done by our dev team on V-Ray 3, especially on the render speed improvements and optimizations.