Problems with Mentalray Rendering in Maya!?!

[Jozvex]

How much memory do you have? Which operating system?

[sin_mania]

I'm working on Hp nw8000 with 1Gb RAM. The problem is there that no matter what cind of scene I render, problem appear. I can't explain my self, how the same thing, sometimes render, sometimes not :surprised
Please help me beacuse a have to finish my project as soon as posible. (I've got 4 days, and since 1 mouth I haven't done anything):blush:
I forgot :) My OC - WinXP SP1 (it's coming with my workstation) I tried with other PC's no results :(

[Jozvex]

It crashes on other PCs too? Hmmm.

All I was going to suggest is that you don't have enough memory, but 1Gb is plenty!

I don't know what else it could be!

:shrug:

[rock]

I think it also maybe a RAM problem. Are all your RAM the same type or speed? For a hard-to-find problem like yours, it's best to narrow the problem one at a time.

1. Get a new computer.
2. Install XP.
3. Install Maya 5, upgrade to 5.0.1
4. Create a small scene.
5. Render with mental ray.

The problem should eventually filter out if you eliminate slowly the suspecting factors.

[lazzhar]

Originally posted by sin_mania
I've just working one month in 5.01 and can't open nothing in older version(5.0).


That's not true, it opens withour any problem.
This kind of problems culd happend if you send a big scene to MR for rendering, it often happen with me but to get rid of that I try to optmize th scene by delete some objects an reduce the textures sizes and so..

Try to shutdown Maya then render from the command line :
mayarender_with_mr yourfilename.mb

One last thing, Maya 5.0.1 is far better than 5.0, dont go back, always upgrade as much as you can.

[gmask]

>>>Hello. I have a big problem with Mentalray randering it sometimes sudanly stops.. . From 4 days I was trying to finish my project but my Maya's just halts when I do rendering with some strange messages like:
C++ runtime library error

Anytime I have gotten that error it is because I am working with a large scene or because I have not properly set the BSP settings for mental ray inthe render globals.

Reinstalling the OS or Maya is not going to make this problem go away.

More ram might help but Mentay ray can work in small amounts of ram with the right settings.

>>>PS: The problem is not from scenes because it appears almost every time no matters in what scene I've working on.

Please describe the scenes your are working on? How many polys? Large texture maps? GI? FG?

[gaggle]

Anytime we seem to press mR to render more than about half a million polygons we seem to run into that error.

I'm very interested in hearing the experiences and opinion of those here that have suffered through the mR crashing.

[gmask]

Originally posted by gaggle
Anytime we seem to press mR to render more than about half a million polygons we seem to run into that error.

I'm very interested in hearing the experiences and opinion of those here that have suffered through the mR crashing.

You need to lower your BSP settings

[lazzhar]

gaggle, it seems you're right. gmask gave us a good advice for MR, it's trying to adjust the raytracing acceleration BSP, I didnt try it to fix any trouble, but I beat each rendering crach by sperating objects to layers and passes. It works fine all the time, and it's also a good habit.

[sin_mania]

My scene is about 50 mb :thumbsup:
I use realy big textures about 1600x1200 and above
But the problem is not there because it appear in any scene no matter the size. I totaly dont know what to do I have two days and I cant work......:scream:
p.s : the problem appear in Software render too :(

[Jozvex]

Everything's ok now, he contacted me via instant messenger and we discovered it was a graphics driver issue.

:thumbsup:

[lricho]

Ok, so what driver was he using? I'm having trouble with MR just stopping too, and i'm beginning to suspect it could be graphics drivers too, but I'm not totally convinced. I know other people have this problem, and there have been other threads on it, but i've not found a truly satisfactory answer.

[gmask]

Originally posted by Jozvex
Everything's ok now, he contacted me via instant messenger and we discovered it was a graphics driver issue.

:thumbsup:

:surprised .. I'm stunned that the driver software would have anything to do with MR rendering. I suppose if this was rendering in the render view then perhaps...

[gaggle]

p.s : the problem appear in Software render too :(

Sounds like his entire computer was suffering from it, so a driverissue sounds plausible enough.

[rock]

Originally posted by Jozvex
Everything's ok now, he contacted me via instant messenger and we discovered it was a graphics driver issue.

:thumbsup: :thumbsup:

[Jozvex]

He's using a HP laptop (but it's good) with a FireGl T2 graphics card. I looked it up on the Alias website (in the Maya Certified Hardware section) and they suggest a particular driver version. He was using much older drivers and when he switched to the ones that Alias recommends, the issue went away!

I had the idea because I remembered that when the school I went to used Maya 4 with Quadro DCC's, it would sometimes completely lock up when you rendered (the renderview would sort of, splinter into lots of pieces!). But Alias made us an early Quadro DCC fix before newer drivers came out and the problem was solved.

[gmask]

Originally posted by Jozvex
(the renderview would sort of, splinter into lots of pieces!).

Otherwise if this was rendering from the commandline I could see no possible connection between the graphics card hardware and the software rendering.

[Jozvex]

Well what about things like how Mental Ray can use your graphics card to render fast Open Gl shadows. Would it still use that feature (if you chose it) when you batch render?

Maybe things like that would rely on drivers.

:shrug:

[gmask]

Originally posted by Jozvex
Well what about things like how Mental Ray can use your graphics card to render fast Open Gl shadows. Would it still use that feature (if you chose it) when you batch render?

Maybe things like that would rely on drivers.

:shrug:

Huh.. I didn't know it could do that.. whaddya know!

However I would assume that if you knew well enough how to make it do that then you might know to check your drivers if there are problems... maybe not?

[Jozvex]

Hehe, well it's just part of the shadow dropdown selection box thing. So perhaps not.

[gmask]

Originally posted by Jozvex
Hehe, well it's just part of the shadow dropdown selection box thing. So perhaps not.

Oh yeah .. I had noticed that but never tried it.. one thing to wathc out for would be ntwork rendering on machines without equivalnet graphics cards if that actually works.

[lazzhar]

I've tested the opengl shadows but they are slow. I guess it's because the time needed for transfert from the graphics card to the proc. And I cannot remember where I've read an article about this issue, they were saying same thing.

The documentation of Discreet Combustion suggest using rendering with opengl because it's faster( and that's tru) , but for network rendering, they recommand switching to software renderer, gmask.

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