Huge file, VRay crashes

[mandarin]

Hello

 

Well, I'm not sure if this really is such a huge file. But VRay keeps crashing anyway. I have attached the settings, and a tiny preview of an old render (without anti-aliasing) which I can't use because of too low quality.

 

This is probably a subject that has been discussed a million times before. Sorry about that. I have read through a lot of the discussions here, but didn't find anything answers that helped me.

 

I'm trying to render out the image in a resolution of minimum 6300x3200. I'm using WinXP 32bit, 3DStudio MAX 9 SP2 and VRay 1.5 RC5.

 

The scene contains only 2 VRayLight's, and light from the environment slot in the render settings.

 

Has anyone got any suggestions for what might cause the crash?

[Jason Matthews]

Try to render it with the same settings as shown in your post at a smaller resolution, like 800X600. If it doesn't crash then the issue is your memory I believe. Re-render the image using the render by region setting and basically stitch it together. This is the method I use.

[rivoli]

one thing that may save you some memory it's switching from world to screen as light cache scale, keep an eye on memory usage while vray calculates it and see if it gets too much. if so using a precaculated one when doing the final render may help.

 

this being said, a 32 bit machine will always have problems with big res images, no matter what.

what you may want to do it's rendering to vrimg unchecking "render to memory frame buffer". there's plenty of info about it on the chaos forum, you may want to have a look there as well. what it basically does, it's saving out the output without using the memory needed to display the image in the vfr (which can be quite a bit, especially at that resolution and if there is any other element apart from rgba).

[Ricardo Eloy]

Agreed. The problem is that when rendering an image, max will allocate the amount of memory needed, and if that amount is, by any reason, bigger than what you have, it will crash. When turning off the Render to Memory Frame Buffer option and saving directly to a vrimg file, max will not allocate that amount of memory (remember to set a very small size for max's frame window and the huge size you want for the VFB). Instead, VRay will use your hard drive to store the image, keeping the RAM usage low, hence rendering large images.

[waleedss]

1 st you need to add 3G switch to you system if you have ram more than 1.5 GB.

use v-ray proxy as much as you can

use back burner to render the file and close max .

[mandarin]

Thanks a lot for all the replies!

 

I've tried rendering the picture in a smaller size, and yes it does render without any problems. So, clearly the issue here is lack of memory.

 

Yes, I do have 3gb RAM, and the switch is turned on. And yes, I have tried splitting up the rendering in smaller parts and then stiched it together. I actually managed to render out the image, split up in smaller parts, and in a larger size (about 8500 pixels in width), but without anti-alias. It didn't look good at all, but it worked.

 

So, a possible solution can be to render out as vrimg. I'll do some reading on the subject and see what I'll find out. I might be back for more discussion :-)

 

But, what you're saying is that a 32bit machine will always have problems rendering out large files like this. What about a 64bit machine? Does it have any limits for how large the renderings can be?

[rivoli]

But, what you're saying is that a 32bit machine will always have problems rendering out large files like this. What about a 64bit machine? Does it have any limits for how large the renderings can be?

 

xp 32 it's limited to 4 gigs of total memory that it splits equally between system and applications, so it can't allocate more than 2 gigs for a single process. actually less than 2 gigs, max for example tend to crash around 1,6 1,8 gig (even less sometime).

xp 64 (or any vista 64 for that matter), doesn't have a memory limit so any process can use as much memory as your system can provide (sort of, it actually has a limit but it's very very difficult to get there). of course you also need 64 bit applications, which is not a problem, at least as max and vray are concerned.

even 32 bit applications can make use of up to 4 gigs of memory under xp 64, which is twice the limit they have on xp 32 anyway.

saving memory it's always good though, and it's a healthy way of thinking. when you run out of physical memory, even if max doesn't crash, it starts getting real slow.