as mentioned above - at our offices, the render farms not ready yet so we’re using our boxes to render but being an inhouse archi-viz team, we need to do photoshop/emails/etc…misc to get through the stuff we have to do daily but we’re finding out that with vray 1.5 final that this happens so it cripples our workflow a bit.
Anyone know how to change/fix this? Its probably a setting in MAX/Vray somewhere?
i use process tamer. when 3dsmax is using more than 80% of the CPU load, it throttles its priority back to low so you can work in other applications. when 3dsmax finishes rendering it increases the priority back to normal. not perfect, but it will allow you to do other things while your machine is rendering.
you can thank Jeff Mottle for originally recommending this app.
There is also an option in the System rollout of V-Ray called “Low thread priority” that will cause V-Ray to use render threads with lower priority.
There is also a way to make the 3ds Max process have below normal prioriry always, but I can’t remember how this was done exactly…
Best regards,
Vlado
i think it is on scriptspot somewhere, it’s a macroscript that is supposed to go to the startup folder to be autoloaded.
Regards,
Thorsten
Isn’t there a way to make Max use only 3 of your 4 cores on your workstation? I can’t figure it out right now though…
Task Manager - Processes - 3dsmax.exe - right click - set affinity 
careful with that set affinity crap its contageous. I did that once, and for weeks every process i started would only start up using 1 processor. i had to manually set affinity every time for ages before it went away! :evil:
This is the one:
I just did this two days ago on co-workers machines that I’ve co-opted for an urgent render job…you just take the level you want and drop it into the scripts>startup directory (on each computer)
One thing I’ve noticed, if you use it for rendernodes, it seams it’ll only work on files created with the script loaded…I haven’t fully tested that theory though…
Eric.
thanks a lot - ONLY after I fired off an email with the “suggestions” did our IT guy come running say “We"re not buying or installing non-standard software”… and suggested we do the set affinity thing.
will try that script + vlados suggestion
thanks a lot
as vlado mentioned, low priority works fine for stuff like Photoshop..
Yeah you just need this code saved into priority.ms and dumped into the maxscript startup folder.
sysinfo.maxpriority = #low
I dont see why you cant just tick the low priority tick box? surly it will do the same..
well sure.
But this affects max in its entirety not just vray. Plus you wont need to hit the tick box each time.
Just makes things a little easier. (very little if any 
)
this is uncanny! somebody else posting a similar issue just 24 hours apart!
i will look into the priority options, but what i don’t get is why this is necessary. with previous software, we didn’t need to bother with tweaking priorities - it just worked. also, why isn’t there a ‘lock up’ when doing DR renders?
In DR mode, V-Ray automatically uses low priority threads.
Also, this to a very large extent depends on the thread scheduling performed by the OS. For example, when I was on WinXP 32-bit, I rarely had to demote the 3ds Max priority to work in something else. However, when I moved to WinXP 64-bit, this was no longer the case… on Vista, things seemed better again.
Also of note, in newer versions of V-Ray there is significantly less thread locking, allowing all the threads to run full in parallel, instead of waiting for each other to release some common resource.
Best regards,
Vlado
Thanks V - I was wondering if our hardware was the issue, but it seems not from what you are saying. Windows! :evil:
(So presumably, rendering with lower priority threads is slower? Significantly slower?)
It may be a tiny little bit slower, depending on if the machine is also doing something else. Normally the difference would be on the order of seconds.
Best regards,
Vlado
Dont know if this will help anyone, but in my experience this happened to me exclusively when using max 9 64 bit, didn’t know what was going on! the system was unresponsive no matter how low i set the priority until i turned off max’s bitmap pager… then I had no more problems. Hope this works for someone…
Jorge