Large scene at hi-res crashes VRay

[dbarnard]

Greetings, all!

 

I've got a heavy scene (2.2Mpolys) with lots of bitmaps and lights. It renders okay at lower resolutions, but when I go over 1280 X 720, I get the dreaded "network renderer is terminating" message, at random times on random strips. I'm strip rendering on 5 machines, all of which have 2gb RAM. I'm using irr/LC, adaptive DMC, medium presets, latest builds of VRay and 3ds max.

 

I figure that it's got to be some sort of memory overload situation... I'd like to be able to render out some huge pics, at some glorious day in the future!

 

Here's a partial list of tweaks that I've tried, to marginal avail:

 

downgraded raycaster parms, smaller bucket size

turned on Bitmap Paging

proxied all complex meshes

lowered res on bitmaps

monkeyed with various GI settings

geometry is dynamic, various settings

 

I'm at home now, so that's all that I can remember for the moment. I've got a presentation due Wed. morning, so I'm hoping that my renders have gone through over this holiday weekend.

 

Any comments would be appreciated!

 

db

[jucaro]

have you tried rendering in strips?

[moodo]

all your settings are o.k i guess. we had some similar problems with huge scenes and high resolutions. and we solved this in the same way like you. one thing what can help a bit is to set all geometrie on bounding box. close the scene and open it again this will reduce the used ram. good luck

[STRAT]

one thread will do please

[JamesTaylor]

have you tried rendering to a .vrimg file, your frame buffer use RAM to store the image as its rendered, the larger you resolution the greater amount of RAM is required to store the picture. The .vrimg writes each bucket to file and can be set to show a low res preview if needed during rendering. It should save you another RAM overhead.

 

Personally i think your best option is to continue creating proxy files for heavy geometry, i use them all the time and have rendered scenes with 10million + polys no problem.

 

Are you using lots of opacity maps too, from my experience it can cause vray to struggle in comparsion to simply throwing polys at it, and i'd imagine its has a large RAM overhead also.

[RodT]

you can monitor your resource consumption via task manager/performance. My first steps, aside from the ones you've taken, would be to try optimizing as many objects as possible, and start dumping some of the lights. Good luck, been there.....

[AlNe]

1. If you had Win XP with sp2 or Server 2003, try to load OS with 3Gb key. With it 3dmax will be able to use more memory. My example:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP 3Gb" /noexecute=optin /3Gb

2. You can use command line rendering without loading 3dmax interface: search "cmd" in help file.

3. You can split render to several regions and render them one after another. Use Photoshop to unit them.

[radii]

Check your image sampling settings. If you were to use Subdivision sampling for example, and had the adaptive amount set to a low value ( > 0.1 ), this would definitely crash your rendering at a high resolution. And when it does, it happens randomly at some point during the rendering process , I think ...

Worked for me in scenes with tons of instanced proxies at resolutions beyond 6000X2500 pixels through backburner. Strip-rendering wasn't even necessary.

Granted, my machine does have 4 GB of ram, but with the adaptive amount set to 0.01, it crashed every time during final rendering ( after irr map / lc calculations ). With the task manager open, I could watch the ram consumption go from ~ 500 mb to ~ 3.8 GB within the first 10 buckets of final rendering, and then blow the lights out

With the adaptive amount set at the standard 0.1, ram consumption was barely over 2 GB at 6400X2700 pixels.

[alfienoakes]

what are your exact lightcache settings..?

[dbarnard]

Okay, so I think that I fixed it!

 

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I sort of attacked the problem on all fronts, so I don't really know *exactly* what it was that I did. Probably the big thing was to go to World units in the Light Cache (thanks for the hint, alfienoakes), and set them at 6". All of the VFB commentary didn't do much good, as I'm strip rendering on a 5-machine farm.

 

A big thing was to use the Instance Duplicate Map command in the Material Editor's Utilities menu. I also had a lot of duplicate materials, so they were loading multiple copies of the same map. Yeah, sloppy, I know...

 

I cut down the Max Depth on Reflections/Refractions to 3, as I have this big shiny floor with shiny wood furniture sitting on it. I raised the Noise Threshold on the DMC Sampler to 0.005, and the Min. Leaf size to 1/4".

 

I killed the 3dsmax.ini file, which evidently had corrupted- I was getting bitmap out-of-memory errors. That lowered my rendering time significantly (I think). It's in a hidden place in max9... The sysadmin here is going to write a script to clean out all of the pesky buggers when the renderfarm machines are restarted.

 

I was able to pump out a 1920 X 1080 image earlier today, so life is good!

Thanks again for the help, all!

 

db

[gfa2]

Another thing I've found is the use of non Vray materials can render fine at lower res and when up pump up the resolution...you get crashes. Can be frustrating, just another reason to go with all Vray mats.