GI error message - photons not stored after emitting...

[ABK]

Hi,

 

I've been lighting a scene using global illumination in 3DS Max 9 with mental ray. the scene renders fine on my machine but causes the following error message to appear when rendering on a colleagues machine.

 

"RCGI 0.4 error 361053: no photons stored after emitting 1000000 photons from light "mr Area Spot13|Light" (tag 62a): canceling emission job"

 

Both machines have the same memory (4Gb) and similar processors.

 

I've not come across this problem before, any ideas anyone?

 

 

Antony

[DanGrover]

It usually means that the light in question is either partly or entirely shooting light off into nothing (ie, the light's not hitting anything, it's just firing off into the background). It doesn't do any harm per se, but presumably that light is there for a reason, and the error usually means it's not doing that well.

[ivanjay]

This does slow down your GI calculation tremendously as the rendering engine is trying to source the bouncing and path of the photons which do not exist.

 

Some common ways to fix are:

 

Place a sphere around your model to contain.

Ensure there are no gaps between geometry.

Make sure the light is in the correct placement (below a ceiling etc.)

[nicknitro]

I thought that when that error shows up it usually means that no geometry in the scene is set to Recieve Photons. I may very well be wrong, because you said it worked fine on your local comp.