Vray Crashes C4D

[renderedhero]

I got Vray installed and finally working yesterday morning. I spent all day playing in it and trying different things. By last night I got all the settings in a good place to where I want them for my scene. It worked all day without crashing, and now when I do the actual render, C4D crashes in the "cray building static raycaster" step. The weird thing is that it renders just fine as a preview. It only crashes when I do a final render. Any thoughts would be great!

Thanks!
Brian

-p.s. Thank you Stefan for all your help getting me straightened out on the install. I love this rendersystem!

[stefan]

well vray does not crash normally, only if you go out of ram it can crash.
maybe you have a way to high setup for the final render?
or if not you can maybe post scene so we can help you.
cheers
stefan

[renderedhero]

I've narrowed the problem down further. It appears that the couches I made for the scene are what are making C4D crash. So now when I try and render, I just get a window saying there isn't enough memory to perform the task. I have 11GB of RAM, so are there settings I should be playing with to try and get this to work? I have been adjusting the dynamic memory limit and the max tree depth-none of which are working.

I also tried rendering these in a buffer setup with VrayCompositing Tags but that had the same effect. (Or it would just stop rendering at 46 seconds.)

Thanks-
BS

[noseman]

there is a possible problem when Vray reaches the 4GB limit for Mac OS X.
I encountered it in a scene I had previously. I was checking the memory usage in the Activity monitor. When the memory consumption reached 3.99GBs then boom! C4D would crash.
I had to simplify the scene and downres the texture bitmaps.
The only solution is to optimize your heavy scenes so that Vray uses the less possible RAM.
The memory hogging tasks are:
1. creating the geometry
2. Loading the bitmaps

rendering its self is not that memory intensive.

If you use a lot of instances and cloners, use a lower resolution original, since all instances and clones are polygonized during render and the scene size becomes huge.

Thanks

[ichi.one]

indeed i experienced this a few times,
vray/c4d just quits when reaching the 4 gigabyte limite
or gives a bug report

specially with large pictures sizes (+4000 pixels) and
while rendering all the multipass channels
most of the time if we render large pictures we use the split option

who said we don't need 64bit on macs ? :roll:

btw i just noticed last night there is no speed difference if you render
with or without multipass channels (2minutes on a 2hr rendering)

[renderedhero]

So I managed to get it start rendering again. I had two sofas and a chair that weren't optimized. Awesome! Here's the new issue: When it does render it takes close to 1 1/2 hours for one still.

The biggest issue:
I had to put quite a few more things in the scene to make it complete. (i.e. plants, tables, books, etc.) These all have to be in the scene for the client. I noticed that the Vray Compositing Tag doesn't offer Object Buffers. Will the standard C4D compositing tags still work? Or is there a way I can render a pass with just the structure, then the furniture, then the accessories, etc. In addition, there will be a camera animation through this scene.

Any thoughts?

[renderedhero]

When I do a render with "override material" checked, it renders just fine. When I render with the materials, it's (by my estimate) about a 10 hour render. It takes well over an hour to get a few spots on the screen while it's building a light cache. I do have my textures in three different folders on two separate hard drives. Would this be an issue?

Thanks!

[renderedhero]

On a second thought:
Is there a way to do two passes, one that's just geometry and then one with just materials?

That may sound stupid, but it's worth a shot?

[darianr]

You may or may not have optimized one or many of your materials very well. It sounds like you are new to Vray, so, this is pretty likely. Because I screwed up a lot of materials in the past.

Slowing down is normal with all your materials, but, it shouldn't slow to an absolute crawl if you have set them up properly. I had, and still do to some degree, a habit of over complicating my materials.

So, check your most complicated materials, especially with blurry reflections/refractions. Also, your AA settings may not be optimized.

So, check that stuff. If you don't know what you are checking for, then let us know and we can possibly point you to what you should and shouldn't do in your materials.

Oh! Make sure you are using uncompressed image formats! Like TIFF or TGA. Not Jpeg.

[Tong]

Oh! Make sure you are using uncompressed image formats! Like TIFF or TGA. Not Jpeg.

why? just curious.

[renderedhero]

I am very new to Vray, this is my first project with it. (Unfortunately it's a pretty big client project too.) Most of the textures I have, have some sort of reflection or specular property to them. All the has a very small tile bump property. I only have a coupe textures that use bitmaps as the color property.

what things should I looking for. I have downloaded most of my wood and cloth textures from www.vrayc4d.com

[renderedhero]

Oh! Make sure you are using uncompressed image formats! Like TIFF or TGA. Not Jpeg.

Do you mean for the texture bitmaps? Or the final rendered image save?

[Tong]

texture bitmaps

[renderedhero]

Okay. I did that, but I'm still looking at like a 45 hour render. :shock:

[darianr]

Oh! Make sure you are using uncompressed image formats! Like TIFF or TGA. Not Jpeg.

why? just curious.

Conserving memory. It's not going to drastically reduce render times. It will just help with memory conservation. All of the other things I mentioned will help a lot more.

[Tong]

Conserving memory. It's not going to drastically reduce render times. It will just help with memory conservation. All of the other things I mentioned will help a lot more.
disagree, what better to load TIFF in viewport - 100 mb? or load JPG decompressed during render time to 100 MB ?

[stefan]

hi Renderhero,
if you have a 45h rendettimes you have some very wrong setups or a real slow computer:-)
mabe post the scene?
cheers
stefan

[darianr]

Conserving memory. It's not going to drastically reduce render times. It will just help with memory conservation. All of the other things I mentioned will help a lot more.
disagree, what better to load TIFF in viewport - 100 mb? or load JPG decompressed during render time to 100 MB ?

I dunno, people always told me to use TIFF and such for this reason? Am I smoking crack?

[Tong]

it`s Q of speed/ram, like Mac and PC ;-)

[renderedhero]

hi Renderhero,
if you have a 45h rendettimes you have some very wrong setups or a real slow computer:-)
mabe post the scene?

It must be something very wrong with the setups. I have a 3GHz 8-Core MacPro with 11GB of RAM.

I'll post the scene, but it's pretty big. Running about 180MB. I can't really include the textures the folder is about 1GB and There are a lot of textures.

www.renderedhero.com/DSM-Vray-NewTexture.c4d.zip
When it's zipped it's about 46MB. It will be done in about 10minutes from now.

Thanks!

[darianr]

I the same MacPro as you, but with more ram. As stated though, Cinema can currently only use 4GB at the most though.

Anyways, I render gigantically huge scenes. So, once you optimize them they will be fine.

Some of my scene files are over 1GB in size. Not including textures.

So, it's really more about material, settings optimizations. I probably can't look at your file until I get home though. Which will be in like 6 hours. Maybe someone else will before then.

[renderedhero]

Sounds good! Thank you! It's only 9:00 in the morning here, so 6 hours is about an hour before I leave to go home. It would be awesome to set a render for the weekend if I could as this is the last weekend I have to option to do so.

Thanks!

p.s. do you want me to post a zipped tex folder?

[darianr]

Your link isn't working for me.

[renderedhero]

Awesome. Wouldn't you know it, my page expired right after I sent those links, because I checked them and they worked. But now my site is down. I'm posting them on my office's FTP site.

*Sigh* :roll:

Okay.

www.ascentium-lounge.com/brian/Window capture 4 copy.jpg
www.ascentium-lounge.com/brian/Window capture 5.png

This one won't be up for aabout an hour. (it's 10:25am now here.)
www.ascentium-lounge.com/DSM-Vray-NewTexture.c4d.zip