VrayScatter, meh

[ctk111]

My experience with both VrayScatter software and customer service thus far has been poor. I'm working on a large scale model with a lot of buildings of varying levels of detail and a large terrain which includes a river. I haven't quite figured it out, but for whatever reason vrayscatter was causing this model to crash in max. The file contained 1 tree model with 25 proxies. I tried a few different options, which included increasing the dynamic memory and then going through all the geometry to see if an object was interfering with scatter. Increasing the dynamic memory didn't work. I thought I figured it out once I hid 4 objects, which seemed to make the software crash. However, once I moved the camera max crashed again. I tried rendering the vrayscatter object by itself in a new file and it worked fine. I tried a bit more to get it to work, but then I gave up and just used advanced painter with no problems whatsoever. It did what I needed and was free. I'm not giving up on scatter completely, but definitely disappointed.

 

My post is part rant, but also to find out some other users experiences with the plug-in. If I could post in their forums I would, but it's been almost four weeks since I initially signed up and have yet to get the moderator's approval. I sent another email last week and still nothing.

 

Btw, I'm running an i7 with 12gb of ram on XP 64

[Claudio Branch]

I use Forest Pro 3 to distribute V-Ray proxies of any object and it works great!

[Devin Johnston]

I've been using it for months and other than a few little bugs I haven't had major problems with it. You should make sure that the program is registered, it's hard to tell if it is because even when it isn't you can still access the plugin and use it you just get very strange results. Their customer service does suck but it's getting better and so is the program, it's kind of an ongoing project so everything doesn't work perfectly just yet.

[danb4026]

I cannot get it to work right at all. I posted on another thread the problems I was having, but haven't gotten any responses.

 

As far as I know, there is no reason that my program should not be registered correctly. Their customer support has been of no help at all.

[Devin Johnston]

Did you try posting on their forum? It usually takes a few days to get a response but they will eventually help you.

 

In your original post you said you only had 25 proxies, what were you increasing your dynamic memory to?

[ctk111]

I currently have it on 700mb. I was reading around a bit more on dynamic memory and read that you should increase it around 100mb over the amount of memory vray is using. In the vray status window it was showing 530mb memory usage, so I used 700mb. At one point, for testing purposes, I went all the way to 11000mb and it still crashed.

 

As for posting in the forums..They need to approve my account first. I signed up almost four weeks ago and have yet to be approved. I sent two emails last week and still nothing, which means I can't post to the forums.

 

I'm pretty sure it's registered because I can change the parameters. Before I registered I couldn't adjust any of them. Maybe there's something conflicting in the file. I really can't say. I put it in another file by itself and rendered 500 trees with no problems. I'll use it on another project, but it's a bit frustrating trying to troubleshoot the issue with this particular file. I just gave up and used advanced painter to place 425 trees and it renders fine, so I know it's not a memory issue.

[Devin Johnston]

If your able to use it with different proxies then there's something about that one tree proxy that it doesn't like. It doesn't sound like a Vrayscatter issue it just sounds like you have a material on that proxy that Vray doesn't like.

[amer abidi]

If your able to use it with different proxies then there's something about that one tree proxy that it doesn't like. It doesn't sound like a Vrayscatter issue it just sounds like you have a material on that proxy that Vray doesn't like.

 

I was going to suggest that too.

[danb4026]

I downloaded Forest Pro Lite today and started playing with it. I have to say that I like it alot. For the little I have used it so far, it seems to work very well with vray proxies and I might get away with using the free version for quite a while.

 

Time will tell.

[Trick]

Daniel,

 

Did you make sure you did a Reset Transform and put the pivot point in the right place BEFORE you saved your mesh as a proxy, as already discussed ? If you did this and make sure you ONLY have VRay materials with simple JPG/TGA/TIF textures there should be no problems with VRayScatter. Some other materials, as some procedural textures and sometimes even PNG's could give problems.

[danb4026]

Yes I did the reset xform and used simple jpg's. iCube responded and said that I needed an updated key file. I sent them my vrayscatter id file and hopefully fixing a registration issue will resolve the problem. I personally doubt it though.