Massive resolution render problems (Maya + Vray)

#1

Hi there,

I need to render out a very high resolution image for print, 50000 x 6743 pixels. Im using Vray 2.0 and Maya 2012. Maya freezes when Vray starts to ‘Building static raycast accelerator’.

First thing I did was decrease the resolution to find out at what point it cannot handle te resolution. The maximum output I’m getting is 36000 x 4855.

I did a number of things testing if this could help;

  • Deleting all the objects but one in the scene.
  • Deleting all the lights.
  • Changing the file output, tried PNG & EXR.
  • Creating a whole new scene with a new camera and just a single object.
  • Decreasing de Adaptive DMC to a fixed rate of 1.
  • Changing the raycaster params (decrease max tree depth, increase dyn mem limit)
  • Tried region rendering
  • Tried rendering in the Maya view as well as the V-Ray frame buffer.

Seems to me, at least on my system, vray cannot handle more that the 36000 x 4855 pixels? Hope some one has some idea on what to do?

I am running a Intel i7-3930K 3.20 Ghz, with 32 GB ram.

#2

Send it off from the prompt and slice the frame into subregions via the -reg flag, e.g.

render -x 5000 -y 3000 -reg 0 999 0 3000 -rd c:\foo -im part1 foo.mb
render -x 5000 -y 3000 -reg 1000 1999 0 3000 -rd c:\foo -im part2 foo.mb
render -x 5000 -y 3000 -reg 2000 2999 0 3000 -rd c:\foo -im part3 foo.mb
render -x 5000 -y 3000 -reg 3000 3999 0 3000 -rd c:\foo -im part4 foo.mb
render -x 5000 -y 3000 -reg 4000 4999 0 3000 -rd c:\foo -im part5 foo.mb

This will give you 5 tiles which total up to a 20k x 3k image.
If it bails on you make the regions smaller.

#3

Unfortunately that didn’t work.

Again when I try to output to the final res, the render freezes;

render -r vray -x 50000 -y 6743 -reg 0 500 0 500 -rd c: -im part1 renderjob.mb

When I set the resolution to the max. number I found working inside Maya, this command will work also;

render -r vray -x 36000 -y 4854 -reg 0 500 0 500 -rd c: -im part1 renderjob.mb

I Tried on two other computers, same results. I tried with different scenes, same result. My best guess now would be that Vray has a limit?

#4

set your V-Ray memory higher maybe? I use a script to automatically set it to 80% of available RAM:

float $very = `getApplicationVersionAsFloat`;

if ($very < 2014)//float array for 2013 and earlier
	{
	float $memoryAmountFLoat[] = `memory -mb -phy`;
	setAttr vraySettings.sys_rayc_dynMemLimit ($memoryAmountFLoat[0] * 0.8);
	}
else if ($very >= 2014)//int for 2014 and above 
	{
	float $memoryAmountInt;
	$memoryAmountInt = `memory -mb -phy`;
	setAttr vraySettings.sys_rayc_dynMemLimit ($memoryAmountInt * 0.8);
	}

You can also try to see if it renders with brute force/light cache instead of Irradiance Map/Light cache since that takes a lot more memory. IT will be slower but just try it to see if that’s the problem.

PS - V-Ray Tuner has an automatic tile render script. http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/v-ray-tuner-for-maya

#5

i had to do a 10 ft x 12ft render i did it 1/2 the resoluton one shot render took like 45mins granted i had 40cores but the file killed Photoshop chugging like crazy file endedup being like 4gigs Ha as real pain to do

#6

Cgbeide;

The script gives an error? I’m not that common with scripting, so just to be sure, I copy-paste it into the MEL command line (also tried to switch to Python).

I turned off the GI totally. I even created a scene with just one light, camera, box object. His render at 50k x 6k and,
freeze.

Thanks for the V-Ray turner, that seems to be very handy.

Thehive; I have to do 11 of these
poor me … :)[font=Wingdings][/font]

#7

just get the file xy resolution at 300 dpi then find out what the 72 dpi equivalent is then render to that do your edits then re-sample up to 300 dpi. what i did an worked fine let me know if you need help

#8

i used to do a lot of poster work and rarely render at 1:1 for that kind of thing. There are different upres programs (Photoshop CC added a new algorithm for uprezzing) but the best is Photozoom Pro. You can scale up like 200% with that app and get get really good results. Remember that people don’t look at posters the way they look at magazines, so you can get away with 70-100 pixels per inch on a large poster where you’d need 300 for a magazine. Even my art print canvases are only like 120DPI and uprezzed to 160

#9

Thehive; yes, I always work with proxy’s. Although Photoshop handles the 36k files pretty well.

Cgbeige; I just bought Alien Skin Blow Up? It was just 99$. But do you think that Photzoom pro is better?

Normally I wouldn’t create a poster at 300 DPI of that size. But the image is like a very large background that is going to be cropped into smaller pieces to use on several product packages. So the client has a unique background for each product.

Thanks for the help and tips!

#10

ya, I reviewed Blow-up for Macworld a couple years ago ( http://www.macworld.com/article/1163735/blow_up_3_proves_reliable_for_photo_enlargements.html ) and Photozoom Pro is better. I think the 30-day demo doesn’t do watermarks, if you want to try it.