Large models in mental ray crashing

[AniMo]

ok here my few tips for gettin rid of mental ray crashes in maya 5.01

first of all disable "translation progrss msgs" in the mental ray tab

and keep the output window closed while rendereing!
then if using realy high poly count or huuuuuge textures try to render batch instead of viewport
i noticed it crashs mostly to resolutions of
4k and higher -> 8k

additionaly use smedge as rendering tool

hm so far
hope it helps

[Powell]

Id have to disagree with AniMo... Turn ON your 'translation progrss msgs" to 'Detailed Messages' and watch your output window while you are rendering. When Maya begins to crash or does crash...take note of what mental ray was trying to do when it happened. Most rendering problems with MR can be easily trouble shot this way. BTW....how much RAM is it using durring the render??

Ive rendered 160+ million polys in one MR scene without problem....

[lazzhar]

Originally posted by Powell


Ive rendered 160+ million polys in one MR scene without problem....

Waw !! did you Raytrace it? or Scanline it?

Did you just use MR that comes with Maye or you used the Standalone version?

[Powell]

160+ mill was done using the geometry shader along with the standalone version... (ONLY because the geometry shader isnt fully supported in the Maya UI :cry: )
8 raytraced lights were used with it.
Without using the geometry shader, i wasble to render around 28mil polys max with full FG. check out my Alienware Challenge entry for that result.:thumbsup:

[Emmortal1]

Just so you know, you can use placeholder geometry in mental ray for maya through custom text files. It's not very intuitive, but is supported. Maya 6 has it built in rather nicely from what I hear though.

[Powell]

Emmortal1: I use the custom Text nodes to generate the placeholder geometry in Maya, but I have not been able to get it to render within Maya. I always have to export the scene out as a .mi and manualy change the code inside the file to match. Do you know of a work around for this? Ive also tried it in Maya 6.0, but it seems to still have the same issues....:hmm:

[Emmortal1]

That's the method I use, I don't have Maya 6 as of yet, so I'll have to check on it whenever we upgrade. I know that the version of mental ray for Maya in 5.0.1 didn't support the custom text entities natively, but was hoping that would be implemented in 6.

[Zacke]

So I need mental ray standalone to render this file? I can´t do it with mental ray for maya on my workstation?

[Powell]

no...Maya MR can easily handle that many polys...

[pixel mixer]

check the memory token on the render globals, by default is -1 meaning it will use infinite memory. since it's a 32 bit OS and it has a memory limit of 1.3-1.6GB per process and you're using dual CPU it will easily eat a lot of memory and crash the process.

simply put, change the -1 to something like 800 and give it a try

hope it helps

adi
digital FX

[Jozvex]

If that doesn't help, go to the 'Memory and Performance' section of the Mental Ray Render Globals and change the BSP depth to a higher number. That will break the scene up into small pieces and use less memory.

If that still doesn't help, change the number back to 40 and then change the Acceleation Method to Large BSP.

:thumbsup:

[Zacke]

Thanks! it works now. I've set the bsp depth to 400 and physical memory to 800. What should I set task size to? Its 0 by default.

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