Generate Final Gather error/crashing?

[alex_rob]

Hi guys,

 

had a quick problem regarding final gather (and gi) for interior renders:

I'm following Ramy Hanna's efficient interior lighting tips and have come up against a wall with pre-computing the final gather...

 

- I fine tune and generate the gi map, save it and turn the 'read only from file option' (without any problems).

 

- I proceed to do the same with the final gather (generate, with just the basic draft settings) and it gets about half-way and 3dsmax completely crashes - no warning nor error msg except for the 'this program unexpectedly closed'.

 

Originally tried rendering in 3508x2480 - crashed

Halved it to 1754x1240 - still crashed

 

I'm currently running 3dsmax2011 on Win7 x64 +4gbram

 

(I've sucessfully rendered out and pre-generated in 2508x2480 before for an exterior shot - I'm thinking it possibly has something to do with the GI or possibly the use of mental ray proxies in the scene?)

 

does anyone have any suggestions or experience in this matter?

[mdviz]

Sounds like a RAMerror. to me

If you created the maps at 3508x2480 and just reduced the render size without rerendering the maps at the smaller size you might still get crashes. I have experienced this before myself.

 

Did you re render the maps at the lower sizes?

How much RAM do you have?

 

Try rendering with GI off. Using FG you might find it an ecceptable render without GI anyway. Using both often gives very little value for the cost in render/setup time.

[alex_rob]

Problem solved:

 

wasn't actually a ram error or memory error:

 

- for some reason, one of my pieces of interior furniture when rendered w/ final gather causes a complete crash (had to render each separate scene item one by one to see which was responsible ugh).

No idea why this happened - I deleted that and created a furniture piece and no crashes.