CGTalk - Mentalray FG hangs at 99%

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pjohnsen

11-30-2005, 05:24 PM

Hi, I am using mental ray and final gather (but no GI) for rendering an animation.

Most frames render fine but for some mental ray just hangs while computing final gather. The last message I get is something like:

JOB 0.2 progr: 99.6% computing final gather points on UA-16.2

Sometimes it's at 98.9% ;)

I tried turning the final gather rays down. This caused the render to proceed ... but only to hang again some frames later.

I've tried messing with pretty much all the final gather and other mental ray settings. Sometimes I make one frame work only to see the problem re-appear some frames later or when changing some of the animation.

The scene uses SSS (misss_fast_simple_maya), particles (cloud s/w) and a single static 2d fluid (from the tracer bullets sample in the visor). It contains some camera projected background, a character (mostly polys) with FinalRig and some poly geometry for the foreground environment.

Any suggestions on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated.

The scene is rather large so I can't provide it here, but I'll try if I can make a simpler scene which reproduces the problem.

-Pelle

Jozvex

12-01-2005, 01:15 AM

Hmm, well the very last step in the FG calculation is to save the map into either memory or onto the hard drive. If the scene is really big and complex, and you aren't saving the FG map onto the hard drive, it may just get too big to fit into memory?

pjohnsen

12-01-2005, 07:10 AM

Thanks for the prompt reply.

The scene isn't that big, I think ;)

As far as I can see memory isn't the problem. I turned on detailed messages and then it outputs something like:

99.6% computing finalgather
Increased memory with 2048 to 165Mb

I also checked the taskmanager and everything looks fine there. The machine has 1Gb RAM, running Windows XP with 2 Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz CPUs. I've tried doing the render on a different machine - no effect.

Just in case I tried setting a filename in 'Final Gather File' - same result :( Is there anything else I need to do in order to get it to save the FG map to disk?

Btw. I'm using Maya 6.5 and I've tried rendering both within Maya and using the commandline renderer.

-Pelle

Edit: thought I'd just add a screenshot ;) This is one of the frames that works with FG.

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