bwilson Posted August 15, 2003 Share Posted August 15, 2003 I am trying to render a scene, and max 5.1 is constantly dumping out on me, giving me errors Here are my vitals: Dell 3.06g P4, 1g ram, 32meg video card , max 5.1, 4.7gigs available on the c: drive, 80gigs on my project drive, rendering using the default line scanner. The model vitals: output at 3000x2000 res, using light tracer with 1 directional light for shadows and 1 skylight, 2400 objects, over 6 million faces. Physical memory reading at time of render is 650megs, virtual is 857megs. It is a pretty complex model with numerious trees bushes, cars, people, etc. I've tried bumping up my vitrual memory to 2000m minimum and 4,000megs max, tried using the conserve memory feature within max. All with no success. My only option as of now is to render each xref scene independantly and composite all the images in photoshop, but then i'll lose all the reflections, shadows, etc. And i'd really rather setup the image before i leave for the nite and have it be completed for me the next morning. I spent all day today trying to get this image rendered but to no success at all. Gets about 60% complete and dumps out every time. I even went as far as downloading the demo version of vray to see if that would help, and max still crashed. If anyone has any insight as to the cause of this, or some helpful hints as to how i can resolve this issue, it would be great! I am assuming it is a hardware issue, but at this point i have hit a wall. Thanks in advance Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TAKA Posted August 16, 2003 Share Posted August 16, 2003 hey bwilson does rendering this project on a smaller size work or does it also crash? (640 x 480) for ex if it works, u can try splitting ur render into 4 images and re-assemble them in PS(no, i don't mean X-refing them) U can do this by right clicking in the viewport then on "configure" then the "Regions" tab from there u can split ur image into as many pieces as u want without loosing any reflections, shadow, etc..... hope this helps. PS: don't forget to use the "Blowup mode" when rendering instead of "view" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwilson Posted August 17, 2003 Author Share Posted August 17, 2003 thanks for the advise TAKA, I'll give that a shot. the problem only occurs when i have the light tracer rendering option enabled. When i render using no plug-in render, it works fine. I did try to region render starting from about the location that the dump out occured using light tracer, and sure enough it happened again. I have not yet tried to render the image with light tracer on at a low res. Ill give that a shot for diagnotic purposes. If anyone else has any thoughts, your comments would be great. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abicalho Posted August 17, 2003 Share Posted August 17, 2003 I'd suggest opening Task Manager and watching for memory. If you're hitting 2GB, then you're running out of RAM and crashing because of that. Solutions in that case would be: - Enabling the /3GB switch in Boot.INI (if running MAX 5.1 and Windows XP) so that MAX uses 3GB instead of 2. (See Microsoft for information on how to add the /3GB switch to your Boot.INI) - Use the Bitmap Pager, so that Bitmaps are paged to the HD freeing RAM for the rest of the project. Hope it helps, Alexander Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwilson Posted August 17, 2003 Author Share Posted August 17, 2003 wow, great suggestions Alexander. I'll try that first thing tomorrow and post how everything turns out. Thank you both very much for your assistance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwilson Posted August 19, 2003 Author Share Posted August 19, 2003 Hey, Alexander... Any thoughts on how to undo the \3gb switch. I get blue screen errors now titled BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abicalho Posted August 19, 2003 Share Posted August 19, 2003 It'd be "/3GB" added to your Boot INI, not "\3BG". In any case, if you cannot boot, you can fix it in some ways: If your C partition is FAT or FAT32, Boot from a Floppy disk created by WinME or something like that and you'll have access to your C drive If your partition is NTFS, boot through the CD, go into Repair Mode, go into Manual Repair, and that should give you a command prompt like thinkgy. With that, you can at least copy files up and down. Last, you should be able to boot bypassing Boot.INI in VGA or Safe Mode (Press F8 while booting) and those will allow you editing Boot.INI again. Hope this helps, Alexander Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwilson Posted August 19, 2003 Author Share Posted August 19, 2003 hey alexander, sorry, just a typo on this forum... that is how i entered it into the boot.ini file. Guess my machine did not like it too much. Trying to revert the issue now, thanks again for your quick responce. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwilson Posted August 19, 2003 Author Share Posted August 19, 2003 FYI TO ALL: /3GB Switch is NOT supported by Dell. (Just confirmed by one of their support techs) oh well... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwilson Posted August 19, 2003 Author Share Posted August 19, 2003 well i got my machine back to normal! had to remove my primary drive and add it to another xp box as a slave... corrected the modified boot.ini file, saved, re-installed back as my primary, and viola! back and running. So, back to my original thread... i tried using the region render as suggested and the bitmap pager, and of course the /3gb switch. All with no success. Does it come down to getting another gig of ram? Does anyone think that this is the cause before i go fork over the extra money? Any additional suggestions would be great. Thanks again to all that have helped in this matter! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abicalho Posted August 19, 2003 Share Posted August 19, 2003 Are you sure you're hitting the 2GB Limit? Does Task Manager show you getting to 1.9GB or around that right before you crash? You maybe hitting something different than a memory limit crash. Alexander Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
proces2 Posted August 19, 2003 Share Posted August 19, 2003 this may have been thought of already, but have you tried render "crop" instead of region? with region is still needs to create the full sized image (gobbling up tons of memory), it just renders the portion that you set within that larger image. with "crop", it doesn't create the full-size image. "crop" is typically the ONLY way that i can render really high-res images (4000 pixels and higher) without getting memory crashes. sean Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwilson Posted August 20, 2003 Author Share Posted August 20, 2003 No, have not heard that solution yet Sean, Thanks for the advice, I'll give it a shot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwilson Posted August 20, 2003 Author Share Posted August 20, 2003 So far Sean's crop render theory is working, it is very tedious though to have to split the image up into sections for hires renderings with multi-million objects. Does anyone out there know of a script to automate this task of splitting a scene up into slices (like you can in Photoshop) but then render each section one at a time, and save them either individually, or stitched together? That would be a very useful tool for this if such a tool exists. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
schmoron13 Posted August 20, 2003 Share Posted August 20, 2003 my guess is to set up netrender (even on the same machine), but initially suspend all the animations. Once you have it setup, just start all of them and walk away (Real slowly, as any sudden movements will obviously crash the system )... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abicalho Posted August 20, 2003 Share Posted August 20, 2003 On the 2nd CD of 3dsmax 5 you can grab the Region Net Render script. It'll split the images, send them to netrender, and join them together once done. Alexander Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwilson Posted August 20, 2003 Author Share Posted August 20, 2003 good stuff, that should hopefully be the answer, thanks again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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