Fire effect trouble

[markf]

I'm trying to add a fire effect to a fireplace in my scene. Using Max 9 and Vray 1.5. I did this recently in another project with no trouble.

 

I create the atmospheric gizmo and size it, assign the fire effect and render.

 

It causes the entire scene to render black except for showing the fire effect. I opened the previous saved version (without the fire effect) and it rendered black. I re-started Max and the previously saved version rendered correctly. Added the fire effect again and then the scene renders completely red. Very odd. I have to delete the effect and re-start Max to get correct render.

 

I have used the fire effect for flames in a fireplace before with no trouble. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong or if this is some software conflict.

 

Any help is much appreciated.

[monkhell]

Maybe you ran out of RAM, check that, cheers.

[markf]

Thanks for your reply. That's a good question but plenty of RAM

 

Some testing with small file appears that if I render the entire view, the fire effect works as it should. If I do a render-region of the fire effect, the rendering goes black and will render black from that point on regardless of rendering the view or region. I have to re-start Max to get the view to render.

 

I worked around this by using the Vray frame buffer with "render about mouse pointer" enabled.

 

Installing Max 2008 soon and if this remains I may mention it and see if anyone gets the same results.