Can Anyone Diagnose This Error Message?

[Michael J. Brown]

I've been getting this upon rendering an interior scene. It doesn't occur until I hit "Esc" to cancel the render (because Photon Emissions seem to stall out, with Final Gather never starting up - only empty bucket brackets)

 

Can anyone tell me what this error might mean? (Besides the painfully obvious fact that I'm doing something wrong with my scene)

 

Thanks.

[mesht]

i ever get that msg before, and if i can recall, it has something to do with your scene geometry, or partly of it. my suspect are the lights that could be causing the error. could be some of them are corrupted. only occurs when you use FG to render? How about GI?

[Michael J. Brown]

I'm rendering with both FG and GI, using photometric lights - about 3/4 of which are area lights with area shadows + a daylight system. Polygon count is about 2.3mil

[Dave Buckley]

if your copy of max is legit, you could send an error report to autodesk, and hopefully get answer back and a possible fix

 

if it is not legit then i'm afraid i can't help you as i have never seen the error message.

 

I'd take a wild guess that something to do with the size of your scene and mental ray cannot handle the memory usage when it comes to rendering. maybe distributed rendering would easy the processor power of your machine, or memory that mental ray uses whilst rendering and calcualting fg and gi in such a large scene

[Michael J. Brown]

My copy is legit. And, yes, I figured it may very well be a memory issue. Though I think I need to have my system completely overhauled too. Because it has been running interiors extremely slowly lately.

[daniohayon]

I don't think it's your memory. It happened to me before using Max 8/9.

 

I found out that one of my objects had two double edge which made it 'open and closed'. The way to solve this is to isolate few objects and render. If the render is good then you move to the next bunch of objects and like that isolate the one object that cause the problem.

 

In edit poly go to Border sub object and select the entire object to find any unseen holes, or just run STL check modifier.

 

The other possibility is that the material assigned to the object is corrupt(happened many times ) then you replace it with a completely new material(no copies...)

 

Hope this helps,

 

Dani

[Michael J. Brown]

Thanks danio.

[Masik]

can you take a screen of your output window?

[Michael J. Brown]

can you take a screen of your output window?

 

Nope. It's been days since I got that message. Since then, I've changed my rendering settings and started rendering scenes in segments (to minimize memory overload). It has worked for the most part. Renders are taking for ever (43 hours for one 2400x1600 render) but i'm not getting that error message anymore.

 

I'm currently having my laptop wiped clean and re-imaged. My renders didn't used to take this long, so I figure it had to be something related to the health of my machine. If fact, I think the problems may have started when I started using bit torrent software. Hopefully the re-image corrects my issues.

[daniohayon]

Nope. It's been days since I got that message. Since then, I've changed my rendering settings and started rendering scenes in segments (to minimize memory overload). It has worked for the most part. Renders are taking for ever (43 hours for one 2400x1600 render) but i'm not getting that error message anymore.

 

I'm currently having my laptop wiped clean and re-imaged. My renders didn't used to take this long, so I figure it had to be something related to the health of my machine. If fact, I think the problems may have started when I started using bit torrent software. Hopefully the re-image corrects my issues.

 

I thought the same thing for some time and it wasn't the case, try the cross check as I mentioned earlier just to be sure.

[NgoJennifer]

hey there, I've rendered eacdh object on it's own to see which one is causing the crashing.. none of them are, but when I render at once, it crashes.. saying they they can't allocate XXXXXX memory........

 

I tried to render in draft setting with the smallest dimensions... that still crashed =/

[mattclinch]

its usually a memory error. i've had it before. check the 'conserve memory' option in the processing tab and enter 500Mb for the limit (usually a good value, but depends of the size of the scene you are translating)

 

however, the main reason i have had this error before is due to ridiculous sized texture maps in my scene using too much memory on scene translation. check sizes perhaps?

[NgoJennifer]

hey Matt, thanks for that reply!

 

I've had my "conserve mem" check on for quite a while, the crashes just happened yesterday. my maps are below 2.5 mb. 95% of my maps are below 1mb. Tho my conserve mem is at 250... i'll bump it up and see what happens.

[daniohayon]

hey there, I've rendered eacdh object on it's own to see which one is causing the crashing.. none of them are, but when I render at once, it crashes.. saying they they can't allocate XXXXXX memory........

 

I tried to render in draft setting with the smallest dimensions... that still crashed =/

 

At this point I would create a new file and merge all objects from the old scene. and just render with no FG/GI. then add things as you go. It's all about isolations...until you find the bug