Vray freezing without error messages

[cjjat puresilica]

Hi,

 

I have been trying to get to grips with 3ds max 2009 and Vray 1.5 for a solid month. (day and night!)

 

I model in AutoCAD Mechanical Desktop (for technical reasons peculiar to me) and wish to render in 3ds max.

 

I seem to have overcome all of the major hurdles except that is of not knowing whether a render will run through to the end.

 

Often, after 30 minutes or so it just grinds to a halt without error messages.

 

Even if I leave it in that state for many hours it appears not to progress, although still no errors or warnings.

 

I am running an Asus A8N32SLI-deluxe motherboard with an AMD Opteron 148 processor running at 2.21 GHz with 2.98 GB of RAM on a 32 bit xp pro sp3 with the 3GB switch allowing PAE.

 

I have updated the bios and all other drivers and cleaned the registry etc.

 

It seems not to matter what resolution I use, although I am endeavouring to render at 4000 x 3000 pixels. I am reading the Light Cache and Caustics from a file already created to endeavour to keep it operating within the 1 GB VM limit that seems to be set by either max or Vray. Although I have the system requested 4.6 GB of VM available.

 

If anybody could throw some light onto my problem I would be most grateful and what is more, start to get more than 3 hours sleep a night!

 

Thank you so much,

 

CJJ

[cjjat puresilica]

Bump

[kippu]

can you post some screenshots at where it is halting?

[cjjat puresilica]

Dear Kippu,

 

Thank you for looking at my problem.

 

In the meantime I have swapped motherboards, finding that my memory was not stable. I have also reduced the resolution to 2000x1500 pixels from 4000x3000 pixels. And it now renders fully.

 

May I ask in your experience can I get the same level of detail with this smaller resolution if I use something like Genuine Fractals afterwards in Photoshop?

 

Can you also please advise what format to save to, to achieve the best detailed resolution in Photoshop i.e. tiff, exr, hdri etc.

 

I am most grateful for your kind, experienced help.

 

cjj

[Tommy L]

What are your render times like at the lower resolution?

Sounds like vray is running out of RAM to play with. If you are serious about doing high res renderings you have two options:

1: Change to a 64bit opreating systema nd increase the amount of RAM in your setup (recommended)

2: Render in strips or regions (pain in the ass)

 

Show us a render! Then show us the settings. There are many things you can do to optimize a scene. As soon as you mention Caustics all kinds of alarm bells start ringing.

[cjjat puresilica]

Hi Tommy L.

 

I'll send a render tomorrow if that is OK.

 

I'm currently battling with lighting and transparent reflections in the glazing.

 

So a rain-check until tomorrow.

 

Many thanks,

 

Christopher

[Tommy L]

Christopher,

Bare in mind you are re-fighting battles that have been fought and won many times over by the warriors of the cga armed forces. An image post and a couple of questions could save you countless render tests....