salvador Posted December 22, 2011 Share Posted December 22, 2011 Hi CGarchitects, I need some good advise. I'm producing a scene of a housing development and max crashes even after a simple panning action after a render is done. The setups: HARDWARE: Intel i7 2.8GHz 8 GB DDR3 nVidia Quadro FX 580 SOFTWARE: Windows 7 x64 Max 2011 - Vray 2.0 (vray is not causing the crashing) SCENE: Native geometry is qute light; some walls, pavements, curbs, sidewalks. The rest of the geometry is arranged in Xrefs which in turn are comprised mostly of vray proxies (instanced of course); eg, house model 01 (12 units) is an Xref, lamposts are in an Xref, etc. There are grasses (autograss) lots of plants, vehicles, etc, but most of all of it comes in as proxies. Polycount overall: circa 19 million polygons. What else can I do? Should I disable Xrefs after rendring for editing and re-enable them before next render? I'm outputting to .vrimg so I can load any image to VFB and I'm doing some region rendering to a loaded vrimg with whatever changes I make. Hope you guys can shed some light here. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LukeC Posted December 22, 2011 Share Posted December 22, 2011 A few things come to mind that you might be able to try - file size: how big is your file (and xrefs). It may be huge and is eating up your ram. - garbage collect: type gc() in the mini listener window (bottom left) to free up some memory - new scene - go to new -> keep objects. There may be some issues with the scene hierarchy that can slow the file down / cause crashes. Keep not that this will get rid of any render / scene settings at the same time. - plugins: you may have a rogue one that is playing up Thats all I can think of off the top of my head for now. good luck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
salvador Posted December 22, 2011 Author Share Posted December 22, 2011 (edited) A few things come to mind that you might be able to try - file size: how big is your file (and xrefs). It may be huge and is eating up your ram. - garbage collect: type gc() in the mini listener window (bottom left) to free up some memory - new scene - go to new -> keep objects. There may be some issues with the scene hierarchy that can slow the file down / cause crashes. Keep not that this will get rid of any render / scene settings at the same time. - plugins: you may have a rogue one that is playing up Thats all I can think of off the top of my head for now. good luck @LukeC: Thanks for the quick reply. I typed gc() and the mini listener returned: 389968L. I can´t really say I know what this means. I proxified my lamposts (82 of them which have two hanging flowerpots with flowers each) and apparently I got an improvement; I'll re-run over my Xrefs and see what else can become proxy. I thinks it's a ram issue. I assinged 6000 MB out my total to Vray dynamic memory limit, trying to leave 2000 free for Max alone and windows. I also unchecked "Low priority thread" to give Max-Vray all the room; I keep working nonetheless, though with this issue. Will keep posting. EDIT: Filesize is 286MB, yes, it's big. Light setup is Vraysun rigged to Vray dome with HDRI mapped in. Could it be the HDRI size playing up here? EDIT2: I get crashes even with half my RAM available; i'm monitoring my system performance. I suspect it's not RAM related. Edited December 22, 2011 by salvador Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sketchrender Posted December 22, 2011 Share Posted December 22, 2011 I never had a any luck with autograss . Try saving a file without it and see if that helps. A single main file with lighting and cams only and then with everything refed in might help too. Would've to see a wire frame of a file that big . Phil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
salvador Posted December 22, 2011 Author Share Posted December 22, 2011 (edited) I never had a any luck with autograss . Try saving a file without it and see if that helps. A single main file with lighting and cams only and then with everything refed in might help too. Would've to see a wire frame of a file that big . Phil Thanks philip. But the crashings are much more evident right after rendering is done; I only have to zoom or pan and ¡pam! max dies with a recover option. A wire wouldn't show much since all xrefs are not visible (for display performance) but here's a low key sample: [ATTACH=CONFIG]46353[/ATTACH] EDIT: I have several displaced stone materials, in case anyone wonders, he he. I'll try supressing the grass and the displacements. and see how it goes. Thanks. Edited December 22, 2011 by salvador Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LukeC Posted December 23, 2011 Share Posted December 23, 2011 Just out of interest, are you displaying materials in your viewport? Try just flicking over to wire colour (under the display tab - shaded - wire color). If you have high res maps this could be causing the problem and I spose in theory as your machine will be low on memory after a render, it makes sense that this would be the time things would bomb out. just a note on the garbage collect - it is really only of use after you've been using max for a while, but as far as I know it makes no difference to the file. You would have more luck stripping the hierarchy. I guess its just a case of trial and error - remove objects one at a time until things clear up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
salvador Posted December 23, 2011 Author Share Posted December 23, 2011 Just out of interest, are you displaying materials in your viewport? Try just flicking over to wire colour (under the display tab - shaded - wire color). If you have high res maps this could be causing the problem and I spose in theory as your machine will be low on memory after a render, it makes sense that this would be the time things would bomb out. just a note on the garbage collect - it is really only of use after you've been using max for a while, but as far as I know it makes no difference to the file. You would have more luck stripping the hierarchy. I guess its just a case of trial and error - remove objects one at a time until things clear up. Thanks LukeC, makes sense to me and yes, some maps (stones mostly) not so light; I'll try disabling mat display in the xrefs too, just in case max is trying to read out this condition. Will report. Cheers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
salvador Posted December 24, 2011 Author Share Posted December 24, 2011 Yep! I've been monitoring my task manager and after renders are done the RAM usage goes down; but then I minimize viewports and the RAM pikes up again to about 85% of the total and stays there; how can it be dumped? the resource monitor reads a lot of memory assigend to Max even if it's idle. Any thoughts? thx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
salvador Posted December 26, 2011 Author Share Posted December 26, 2011 This is the RAM state after rendering in idle Max. [ATTACH=CONFIG]46378[/ATTACH] As you can see the RAM is being taken over, where as the CPU is actually idle (as it should be). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
salvador Posted January 5, 2012 Author Share Posted January 5, 2012 Hi there! I came to learn that I was handling my scene the wrong way. My filesize boosted up to 305 MB. So, I created a new file but instead of Xrefs, I used Containers. It's a lot easier to navigate and the file now has only 32 MB. Open, save viewport toggling it's all now back to normal. Also, one of the containers was causing problems, so I figure this xref was causing the problems as well in the big "old" file. Anyway my stills are done. Time for animation. . . . Cheers ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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