Large Render for Print - VRAY CRASHING - HELP

[tasi55]

Hey guys,

 

Losing hair and sleep on this on. Doing my first large Vray render, had been rendering for 12 hours, woke up in the morning to see my lovely finished image to the news that it had crashed.

 

Using the image in a printed portfolio, image is going to need to be 300dpi in Photoshop, so in VRAY resolution was set at 4000 x 1800. It needs to span across an A3 page. When I did a test at 2000x 900, was big on screen but as you know, on paper was half the size that I wanted so I increased resolution. Does anyone know how to attack this. My machine should be more than enough to tackle this but it crashed! Im running an Vista x64 i7 system with 12GB Ram. Could someone please help.

 

I used Brute Force to get the detail I want, looked good, but crashed. And I dont think the setting were extremely high. Scene is a building situated on the water with lots of Vray Proxy trees in the background. Didnt want to use Irr Map because of blurry reflections.

 

I have attached a screen shot of my settings.

 

Any help would be much appreciated!!!

 

Thanks people.

[WAcky]

Its probably something to do with the fact that you've got your dynamic memory limit set to 1000mb for a 4000x1800px render...

[tasi55]

Its probably something to do with the fact that you've got your dynamic memory limit set to 1000mb for a 4000x1800px render...

 

 

So what would you suggest? I have 12 GB of memory. The only reason I have such a large render size is because when I did 2000 x 900pix, it came up too small in photoshop. If I increased the size in photoshop, to what I wanted it wasnt crisp anymore.

[WAcky]

Put your dynamic memory limit to about 10000mb (10gb) and put the render size back to the full size you want.

 

With a dynamic memory limit set to 1000mb you're pretty much telling Vray you only want it to use 1gb of your availble memory. It's more than likely reaching the limit and crashing.

 

If that doesn't work, let us know and theres some other things you can try but with a system that big I think the memory fix should work.

[tasi55]

Put your dynamic memory limit to about 10000mb (10gb) and put the render size back to the full size you want.

 

With a dynamic memory limit set to 1000mb you're pretty much telling Vray you only want it to use 1gb of your availble memory. It's more than likely reaching the limit and crashing.

 

If that doesn't work, let us know and theres some other things you can try but with a system that big I think the memory fix should work.

 

Thanks for the advice, just before I received your message I read something about the Dynamic Memory limit. I put it up to 8000mb. Its rendering now. The only problem is, the crash happened after like 13 hours of rendering. I used Brute Force and Lightcache. Its rendering as I write this, but I made my primary Irr Map, going to see if this gives me the results I want. Only problem is that I anticipate those splotchy areas, hopefully not.

[WAcky]

13 Hours is an pretty long time for a render even at that size.

 

If you're scared of it crashing again I would suggest saving your IR and LC maps so if it does crash, you dont have to rebuild them again.

 

There is another trick, which is to build your GI maps at half size making sure they are saved, then cancell the render once they're built, resize the render to the full size and re-render. You can get away with it but your computer seems powerful enough not to need this trick.

[tasi55]

13 Hours is an pretty long time for a render even at that size.

 

If you're scared of it crashing again I would suggest saving your IR and LC maps so if it does crash, you dont have to rebuild them again.

 

There is another trick, which is to build your GI maps at half size making sure they are saved, then cancell the render once they're built, resize the render to the full size and re-render. You can get away with it but your computer seems powerful enough not to need this trick.

 

Hi again,

 

With Irradiance map, I left it for about an hour, not even one bucket had rendered and the estimated time is around 16 hours. I really dont know what is wrong, I was using Brute Force as I saw a tutorial by Chris Nichols. Have read heaps of forums and info and my performance is shocking. I might just have to go to Brute Force and do the wait, I have a complex scene with displacement on a the majority of the scene as well as a whole heap of vray proxied trees in the background. This is for a portfolio for my application to do postgrad in Melbourne, deadline is approaching. In your scenes, what settings would you use for you final quality renders and how long would you expect to wait. Thanks once again for all the help you have giving, it is much appreciated. Cheers

[Arnold Sher]

Hi J,

 

I work on a machine that is of very similar spec. to yours. Its I7 with 12 Gig Ram and i can assure you it is a monster! It can handle just about anything you through at it providing you know what doing. Firstly i think you are going too large as this myth about 300 dpi required for a perfect print. Most of our renders are done in 200dpi and unless you are pro who gets to deal with print everyday you won't tell a difference so you can easily go 3307px X 2338px for A3. Another thing that you can do is try to set it up that with IR and Light Cache as your second bounce. There is plenty information on this forum how to do that and the results will be great. If you are still battling another option would be to region render and split it into two pieces and render half and half so you can put the final result in photoshop. I think the problem that you are having is displacement related as too much of it does make Max cringe so my suggestion would be to take all the displacement off that is far away from the camera and only leave it where it is near. There is a method to the madness and if you apply these suggestions to your render you should be able to sort it out. Hopefully this helps and good luck...

[tasi55]

Hi J,

 

I work on a machine that is of very similar spec. to yours. Its I7 with 12 Gig Ram and i can assure you it is a monster! It can handle just about anything you through at it providing you know what doing. Firstly i think you are going too large as this myth about 300 dpi required for a perfect print. Most of our renders are done in 200dpi and unless you are pro who gets to deal with print everyday you won't tell a difference so you can easily go 3307px X 2338px for A3. Another thing that you can do is try to set it up that with IR and Light Cache as your second bounce. There is plenty information on this forum how to do that and the results will be great. If you are still battling another option would be to region render and split it into two pieces and render half and half so you can put the final result in photoshop. I think the problem that you are having is displacement related as too much of it does make Max cringe so my suggestion would be to take all the displacement off that is far away from the camera and only leave it where it is near. There is a method to the madness and if you apply these suggestions to your render you should be able to sort it out. Hopefully this helps and good luck...

 

Hey Arnold,

 

Firstly would like to thank you for your thought out response, really appreciate you taking the time to help, all too often I see in forums guys adding their 5 cents of sarcasm in to massage their egos. Being a self taught newbie to Vray, its a bit daunty.

 

I have decided to give Lightcache a go, Brute Force was just taking ridiculously long and getting worried cos I have a week left till submission and heaps to do. At this moment I am rendering out a Light cache and Irradiance Map at 2000 x 900. Then I am going to render at 3500 x 1575 using these saved files. I read about this method on a post Chris Nichols commented on, seemed like a good idea so Ill give it a try. This way, I can try to get familiar with Irradiance Map and optimizing its settings. You got any suggestions?hehehe... But yeah, I don't know if the displacement in my scene was the problem because the regions with the Vray displacement seemed to render fairly quickly in comparison to my darker regions. My proxied trees in the background do tend to make Vray crawl a little though, but I do not know what I can do with these to speed things up as they are already proxies!

 

One thing I did change was my Dynamic Memory Limit from 1000mb to 10000mb. I dont know if this is speeding things up at all, but I do hope that it prevents max crashing.

 

For your final renders, with glossy regions (glass) and large water surfaces with displace (a small harbour), what settings would you specify for Irradiance Map and Image sampling? I know this is vague, but I have read tutorials and cannot get anything that satifies this scene. I saw a great video on Brute Force and LC by Chris Nichols, so I have basically been playing around with AA settings (ie, Max samples, Clr Thresh..)

 

Thanks heaps for the help (and for reading this long post!!!)

[WAcky]

I use a pretty safe set of setting as a starting point and tweak from there.

 

I pretty much start off with IR + LC. IR on a medium setting and LC set to 2500 subdivs.

 

I use a DMC sampler set to about 2/4 with Catmul Rom as my filter.

 

Then its down to getting noise levels right and tweaking. I use extremely standard settings as I simply haven't had time to try other setups

[mervin_lim23]

hey guys i have the same problem. im doing a final rendering of my project i want an output of 1000X750 on my work but during the process everytime i render, 3dmax automatically shutting down evertime it reaches the 1500 physical memory usage. i turned off some of my displacement and leave all those who are near the camera. but still doesnt work. is there a way to control memory usage in maxscripts? or any suggestion of changing my render setup maybe? im using core2quad 9400 with a 3gig RAM. any help out there? please:)

[mervin_lim23]

hi guys i'm having the same problem. im doing a final rendering right now but it seems that its eating up alot of memory. i'v closed alot of displacement in my scene and left all those who are near the camera. i'v also increased the dynamic memry limit but still no luck. is there any other way of controling the memory usage? please help me.

[WAcky]

Mervin, you already have a thread elsewhere in the forum regarding your problem and should try not to hijack other threads in future.

[tasi55]

Hi all, well thanks guys for all the help you have given me. I still havent successfully completed an image out of Vray but things have been a bit better. Im rendering as I write this. I found that when I tried Irradiance map, I was getting these really dark patch areas on the dark parts of my image, the building is on a reclaimed land plinth/platform in the middle of a harbour and the deck/boardwalk overhang shadows parts of the platform base, it is one this concrete that there are major patches showing. I do this with Brute Force, its not patchy but there is the obvious noise issue, which I can fix by lowering CLR Thresh and upping subdivisions. Not a biggy though because the grain actually doesnt look too bad.

 

I have also changed my maps from png to jpg, this seemed to speed things up a bit. In regards to memory, all my vray proxy trees had opacity maps for the leaves so I disabled opacity maps for the trees in the background.

 

Also, dont know if this is the best thing, but it seems to be working. I have 12 GB of memory and I set the Dynamic Memory Limit to 10,000MB, after a few hours I would return and the vray had frozen and hit the limit. I have found a Mem cleaner for free, whenever my memory climbs to high, I clean it and it seems to work. Wont know for sure if this works until I get to the end of this, in a few hours.

 

Thanks once again WAcky and Arnold !!

[mervin_lim23]

hi tazi. can you tell me where you got the free memory cleaner? thanks and sorry if im hijacking the thread. i did it coz i think my issue is the same as tazi. sorry wacky:confused:

[WAcky]

I think both of you need to try and fix your problem without using some sort of memory cleaner. This isn't the best way to fix your problem. I think you need to find the root of the problem so you can learn why your crashes are happening and learn more about how the program you are using works.

 

If it's a quick fix for a deadline and works then fine, but perhaps you should revisit the scene later on a try fixing the problem properly...

[tasi55]

I think both of you need to try and fix your problem without using some sort of memory cleaner. This isn't the best way to fix your problem. I think you need to find the root of the problem so you can learn why your crashes are happening and learn more about how the program you are using works.

 

If it's a quick fix for a deadline and works then fine, but perhaps you should revisit the scene later on a try fixing the problem properly...

 

Hi again,

 

Yeah, WAcky is right, I wouldn't suggest this as a means to solving this problem, it is just that my deadline is tight and dont have the time to strip down the scene. I have tried every suggestion I could think off, both static and dynamic settings for default geometry and it seems that it gets more done with the static setting. But by the looks of it, only thing left to do is region render the scene in 4 pieces. Will see how that goes. Also, if I have dark patch areas (in the dark areas, for instance under a wharf) do I increase the HSphere Subdivs, it is at 50 at the moment, Interp Samples - 20 and at Medium setting. Any thoughts?

[WAcky]

I think if you were to post a low res (1024x768 eg) of the full render, then perhaps some troublesome regions, you might be able to get some more people on the board helping out, not to mention that its a lot easier to explain the issues with an image than with words some times.

[tasi55]

I think if you were to post a low res (1024x768 eg) of the full render, then perhaps some troublesome regions, you might be able to get some more people on the board helping out, not to mention that its a lot easier to explain the issues with an image than with words some times.

 

Yeah, once this render is complete I will post a screen for sure, I am pretty certain that it is the Vray proxies now, I set the default geometry back to 'Static' and everything is rendering fine, no crash, BUT its taking ages when it gets the the proxies. But only the proxies that are in the distance. The ones the are closeup resolve in a matter of a few minutes. WEIRD. I have a large grass surface with Vray Displace Mod applied. That seems to render pretty quickly.

 

Just a thought, could the Zdepth that I have applied in Render elements have anything to do with this? My min is 0 and my max is 1200m, its a big scene. Could this be why things in the distance take ages to render???? Im using it so that I can play with DOF in post/photoshop.

 

Also the leaves on these trees that are proxys have opacity and translucent maps. I disabled the opacity maps but not the translucent maps. Could this help?

 

I have to get these render times down, this 3500 x 1575 image is taking well over 30 hours. I did region render and the first half finished in 17 hours.

[JayTee]

Here is good instructions for rendering large images for print: http://3d-visualisointi.blogspot.com/2011/01/vray-memory-error-problem-rendering-big.html