Render with render elements - machine hangs

About 15 minutes ago I added all the render elements to vray, just to remind myself what some of them looked like and hit render. The machine dies, mouse moves extremely lagged (about a 5 minute lag, literally) and I can’t do much with it but force it to close down by holding in the power button.

It’s stuck on “preparing global light manager”.

I’m guessing it’s vray, but I suppose it could be something else, though this only happened when I used the render elements. I’m using windows xp x64 and max 2008 x64. Memory shouldn’t be a problem.

Does anyone else ever experience this? I’m going to leave my machine overnight and see if it recovers, the scene is basic, hardly anything to it so I’m totally stumped.

It probably means that V-Ray takes a lot of RAM and Windows has to swap some of it to disk.

There are several things you can do:

(*) Turn off the “Show calc phase” option for the light cache if you are using it;
(*) If you use the 3ds Max frame buffer, enable the 3ds Max bitmap pager from Customize > Preferences > Rendering;
(*) If you use the V-Ray VFB, disable the “Use memory frame buffer” option, enable the “Raw image file” option and specify either a .vrimg or an .exr file to hold the rendered output.

Best regards,
Vlado

Thanks Vlado - i’ll try those.

Judderman.