ScottDeW

Keep in mind that V-Ray RT and V-Ray Adv are two completely separate, and different, rendering engines. Hence why they do not look the same when they render. I wouldn't try to switch between the two much. You'll either want to use V-RayRT or V-Ray Adv. Some people do like to use RT to do some initial set-up of lights, but that's about as far as I would take it. As for the picture quality for V-RayRT, you need to let the image render for a longer amount of time. Think of it as the rendering develops much like a polaroid picture. The longer it goes, the less noise (better quality) you'll get.

Oh yes... I totally miss-read his comment. I always forget about that new Mac Pro. I'd still highly recommend a PC Desktop over that. Definitely more bang for your buck.

I love my Macbook Pro, but for the work you're looking to do... I would go PC. And more importantly, I'd get a desktop. If you're looking to do VrayRT you're going to want the power of the desktop GPUs, especially the NVIDIA ones. And you'll want to get more than one GPU. Trust me, I've got three in my desktop. I only use my Macbook for my Photography and Graphic Design, but only when I'm on the road. You're not going to get "amazing" VRayRT performance out of the Macbook. And considering how thin the MacBooks are designed, I'm afraid to even render with the GPU on those things. Mine (a 2012 model) gets super hot enough with me just opening a 3D app, I can't imagine what it would do the system if I put it under full load with the GPU. Long story short, you'll get more bang for your buck with getting a PC Desktop. If you need a laptop, go PC Laptop with a few additional machines as render nodes.

For the kind of work you're doing, a GTX Card will be more than applicable. You would probably see some performance boost inside of Autocad, but with the rest of the applications listed it won't be worth the price jump for you. You'll obtain great view-port performance inside of 3ds Max since the view-port is DirectX. If you're doing GPU Rendering, I would go with a GTX Titan X. I haven't tested the new 1080 yet, but on paper it seems like it will do really well. Though some of the software will probably need to update to take advantage of the new Pascal architecture.

Sam, I would continue to render the IR maps as you are doing. Once the IR map is done, just fix the areas in question. Unless you do any drastic moving of objects, you really do not need to re-render the IR map. The detail you'd get back from doing so, you'd probably would not notice. The same thing happens to me every now and then, and I never notice a big difference. Now if you are changing the color drastically (from grey to a bright red), you will want to re-render. But if it's just overlapping faces, I wouldn't worry about it. As for how to render out animations... I highly recommened either rendering out from max in either .tga or .png. The reason being, if the render crashes, you can pick up from the frame it failed at. If you were to render a .mpeg out of max and it crashed, you would have to start from the beginning again. I normally compile my images in Adobe After Effects, but if Photoshop is working for you, then keep going for that. I'm sure there might be some cheap, or even free, video editing software out there that will take in image sequences.

Could you post your settings for Primary and Secondary? It also could be a problem with the geometry. I've noticed issues if my mesh has any stray verticies running around in it.

I haven't had any experience with 2.0, so I'd like to know as well. My normal workflow for proxies is combining the elements into one object. Then making the proxy from the single object. However, if it ends up taking too long to do that, I just proxy out the individual elements and group them together. Either way works just fine. Just make sure when you start to duplicate them, they are instances of each other. It still is possible that you are hitting a bad sector of your ram, but I do have a feeling its more of an issue with needing to proxy out your trees. Good luck!

Ah that very well might do it. First thing I've noticed about the Dynamic Memory Limit, that it's per-core of your machine. Or at least it use to be back when 1.5 went final. So you don't want to set it to 8000mb, because that will set aside 8GB of ram per core. You may notice your render times improve if you end up setting this to about 1GB. Secondly, your trees aren't being considered by the Dynamic Memory Limit if you leave them as actual geometry in the scene. If it's actual geometry, it's considered to be static geometry. Things like proxies, displacement, fur are considered to be Dynamic. So the limit only applies to these items. I generally keep my DML at 1GB-1.5GB, when I use onyx. Now I use Onyx Trees myself. Unless you need to animate them moving. You should combine them all into one object, and proxy it out. I then instance them and use a randomize script for scale and rotation to add a degree of variation. Also, you could get a script that can randomize the material IDs of the elements. This way you can add a variation of color to the leaves.

If it is a memory issue, the problem could not be that you are running out of memory. But rather that you may have a bad stick. Have you tried running tests on your memory? You may also want to keep an eye on your task manager when rendering. I've noticed things tend to get weird when you use more than 85% of your total memory when rendering.

I've been using V-Ray for a while now, and even that's a new error for me... Normally when I get an error such as that, I end up rebuilding my scene. I suggest opening a new max file, merging everything in, and then re-doing all your settings. If the problem continues, it might be something in the scene file itself. The problem then is figuring out what in your scene is causing this. Also, if you are rendering any displacement, motion blur, etc... You may want to disable these to make sure that these effects are not the issue. Good luck, I'd like to know how you solve this! -Scott

I find this to be a very annoying feature, especially when saving out passes such as Zdepth in .exr. In Max2010, when you save out a .exr file, there is a drop down in the settings that says "RGBA" be default. If you switch this to "RGB", it won't save the alpha in the .exr. So just make sure you save out an Alpha pass on its own to be applied in Photoshop as a mask.

Studio/Institution: Gensler - Houston Client: Personal Genre: Commercial Exterior Software: 3ds Max 2010, Vray 1.5 SP3, and Photoshop CS3 Website: http://www.scottdewoody.com Description: This was an image that started out as just an experiment. I was playing around with different lights and colors, and the image just kept evolving into what you see here. But one thing I did want from the start was to have the lights reflecting back in the water. I always enjoy images that have lights reflecting back in the evening/night, and I wanted to see if I could create that look and feel. Overall, the image probably took me about 30-40 hours to complete.