Max 7 and Mental Ray crashes

[whoodt]

Hey guys, I've been trying to render an image using GI only (no FG), and when I increase the Photons per light count in the Light properties panel past 250,000, I get a fatal error after the "emitting Photon" stage of the render...something like "fatal error something something, cant allocate XXXXXXXX bytes of memory..." It's strange, as the breaking point is 250,000 photons, if I go up to 260,000 , it crashes with an error described above.

 

Anyone?

[MandelbrotJr]

Well, I'm no MR expert but It sound like your machine has no enough RAM to generate a photon map that big.

Have you tried increasing your paging file ? Other than increasing you available memory I do not know any workarounds, maybe some of the MR gurus can help you out..

 

Best Regards

[kdavenport]

whoodt,

 

Couple of things you could try. First off, under the Renderer tab in the Ray Tracing section, you could try changing the method to Large BSP. This will take long to render, but will use less memory because it swaps in and out of memory in chunks.

 

Secondly, you can go to the Processing and under the Memory Options section, set a memory limit and tell MR to conserve memory. Pretty self-explanitory what this does.

 

Hope this helps!