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# 1 25-04-2011 , 12:51 AM
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Mental Ray Issues

Hey all,

I'm trying to do some test renders of a steampunk nuke reactor environment I'm currently working on. I'm using mental ray and the problem is when I press render it takes over a hour to render out a single image and that's with my render settings set to preview!

I've looked at my computers performance stats whilst rendering and it appears as if mental ray isn't utilising any of my core i7 930 CPU. The RAM usage jumps from 2.5gb to around 5gb and the CPU usage stays at around 1% occasionally jumping up to 20%, but never any higher.

Does anyone know of a bug with mental ray or a setting somewhere that i should have ticked on that would cause this to happen. Im using Maya 2011 and have Win7 64 bit os...

This is only a problem with MR, when i tried rendering using Maya software my CPU jumps to 100% and a few seconds later I have an image, however this project is for a uni assessment and I have to use MR....

PLEASE HELP..I have to have this environment light, rendered and composited within the next two weeks....

-JOel

# 2 25-04-2011 , 02:19 AM
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Mine locks up all the time mate...sometimes I just re-boot and it clears it up. Or I delete any temp files in the system...that SOMETIMES does the trick. I have trouble with MR all the time...hope somebody has some tips cos it drives me nuts.

cheers bullet


bullet1968

"A Darkness at Sethanon", a book I aspire to model some of the charcters and scenes
# 3 25-04-2011 , 08:23 AM
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No luck, Still does the same thing...

# 4 25-04-2011 , 08:53 AM
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Tried a new scene with justa cube and see what it does mate? otherwise export as an .ma and try in a new imported scene....


bullet1968

"A Darkness at Sethanon", a book I aspire to model some of the charcters and scenes
# 5 25-04-2011 , 09:59 PM
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Have you tried using the default shader/ lights to see if it's some kind of crazy shader/light setting?


- Genny
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# 6 26-04-2011 , 12:20 AM
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So I followed all suggestions, I tried just a cube and it worked fine. Copied all my assets to a new scene and redid all my shading networks and also deleted all my lights and applied the default lambert to my models. I did a test render MR was working fine. Went back to my new scene with lights and textures and MR was working...so thanks dunno what idea worked but it did

Joel

# 7 26-04-2011 , 12:33 AM
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Sorry Guys jumped then gun....Mental Ray still isnt working...In my excitment of seeing a picture I didn't realise i was maya software haha woops..

So in my output window Im getting this warning:

TIFFReadDirectory: Warning, foo: wrong data type 7 for "RichTIFFIPTC"; tag ignored.
TIFFReadDirectory: Warning, D:/My Documents/maya/projects/The Core/sourceimages/Stasis Bump.tif: wrong data type 7 for "RichTIFFIPTC"; tag ignored.

It says the same thing about everyone of my texture maps. Any ideas what it means??

# 8 26-04-2011 , 01:10 AM
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Are all your textures tiffs? If they're tiffs using the LZW compression MR won't like them. So, you might want to consider saving them out again using a different compression or another format all together, jpegs and bmps are pretty safe.


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# 9 28-04-2011 , 02:19 AM
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Thanks guys for all ur help..porblem is solved for real this time...Mental ray was having issues with a whole bunch of 4k textures haha I guess bigger isnt always better...

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