Mental ray memory
 

Hi

i posted this in the tech sections but worry that it wont get seem very much and i really am stuck. Im sorry if this is bad practise.

some of you may have seen my WIP thread on my turntable. Now I have been rendering my scene using mental ray and all was going well, however i have since duplicated my turntable so that there are two (as you would expect). The scene is 2238058 faces (scene file .mp is 163mb!!!) and when I try to render it with MR and final gather its aborts and says it has ran out of memory.

now I am running Maya PLE so the MR render is 512x512 on my mac book pro 2.33Ghz processor with 2GB of RAM and I thought that this would be sufficient to render this scene?

I have searched for this problem and have seen a few similar situations but no real solutions?!? I dont know much about MR render so are there any setting or sample rates that I can change that might help me?

also worth pointing out that it also fails when rendered using maya software render.

i have tried:
to increase the BSP size and decreas BPS depth,
iv altered the memory limit,
i have tried to increase the task size
optimized the scene size
exporting objects on demand

and nothing as worked. we still run out of memory when computing final gather points!!!

one thing i have not tried is to render from command line so that maya isnt using memory..how would i do this with a .mp file?

lastly i think alot of memory is taken up in translation, but i dont no what this is or how to customize it or if i need it?

any help would be great as id really like to figure this out.

Thank you so much for reading
cheers
robin

do a batch render instead cause rendering 2 million tris in the render window takes up a lot of memory. I have ran into this problem before, so just set your settings to what you want and batch render.

cheers. I have kept all my FG and MR settings the same and simply clicked batch render. It appears to be doing something (by the noise my computers making lol) but there is no real indication that it is rendering anything? when i click batch render again it does ask if i wish to cancel the current job so i guess that means that it is doing something at least.

Should i be seeing something, ie progress bar or anything, or should i jsut sit and wait?

thank you so much for replying, this has been doing my nut in for a long while

robin

younglion you are my hero! haha thank you so much batch rendering was indeed the answer. I'm so happy, now i can go on a finish this project properly!

thanks again

robin

you are welcome, and glad to be of service if you want to see the progress of the render click on the script editor the box icon on the lower left of the maya window

you also have to wait and wait, depending on the complexity of the scene. Alternatives to waiting and waiting include buying a render farm and sudoku.

hahaha thanks so much guys. im learning a new thing about maya every day!:beer:

where you can, it's well worth doing a batch render from outside maya, just making a little batch file in your project folder and running it (there are tutorials around the place). I only use the maya render scene when I am doing something quick like a draft shot or something like that.