#2/3 smoothed wire

#3/3 render

NP

I see why you have the problem, its because you arent extracting the canopy from the mesh as I did on the tute so...its a small can of worms to fix but this is why the problems with those areas exist.

As a suggestion just watch the tutorial before ploughing into it. It may make bit more sense doing it this way, and yeah by all means start again it will be worth it.

Jay

actually I am extracting the canopy frame and canopy glass and fuselage are all separate geometry.

I'll post a blow up as soon as I can.

I added some detail and now I cannot render in mental ray. I keep getting several message in the mental ray output window to the affect .. thread xxx: cannot start due to insuffiecient memory.

I have 4 gigs of ram (but I am running 32bit xp pro so I am only seeing 2.75gb)

I have ~4gb of page file space allocated on both the c: and f: drives and both c: and F: have over 400gigs of free space??

I am defragging the drives and if that does not work I am going to exp everything in the scene to a .obj and then re-import.

I used to fix screwy scene node problems by exporting to fbx but they took it out with maya 8.5 (I think). Which really sucks because exporting to fbx and then re-importing was the only way to fix a nurbs problem that still exists in maya but now there is NO WAY to fix it!

GO GO Autodesk!!!!

DAMNIT!

//Error "Fatal (mental ray): mental ray encountered a fatal error. The system may have become unstable. Please save scene and exit maya.

In the mental ray output window....

mental ray for Maya 10.0
mental ray: version 3.7.1.26, Jul 30 2008, revision 26576
mental ray: got 8 satellite CPUs.
MSG 0.3 error 011105: cannot start thread 4: Not enough storage is available to process this command.
MSG 0.3 error 011105: cannot start thread 5: Not enough storage is available to process this command.
MSG 0.3 error 011105: cannot start thread 6: Not enough storage is available to process this command.
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can't allocate 1966776 bytes.
MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can't allocate 1966776 bytes.

Okay I got it figured out.

(1) for single frame renders

in maya 2009 under the render tab open render current frame options

uncheck auto memory limit
click on calculate

This selects the soft memory limit for a single process based on the memory in your system.

(2) for batch renders

In my case I left everything default (ie auto memory limit checked) and batch render works great. In fact it renders significantly faster then a current frame render.

LOL I was just going to tell you to uncheck auto memory limit....

this usually best anyway with Mental ray (in Maya), it guarantees you a render pretty much all of the time.

Batching is faster regardless of animation or single frame purely because its not having to render the image on screen so lots of memory is saved thee also, I batch single frames alot if there are several render layers especially

Jay

While on the subject of rendering do you know if there is a version of mental ray satellite for maya 2009?

I checked the autodesk page and found nothing.

I am just playing around with more canopy details.

I added a lower canopy frame (in anticipation of removing the tri's in the fuselage. I hope this will make Jay happy (smile).

I also added rivet details around the canopy frames.

First here is a blow up of the parts...

wireframe exploded view

non-exploded view

wireframe exploded view

grrrrrr the replace image file option does not work and if you delete an image then you cannot add one if you edit.

Love the rivets in the canopy, very sexy!! nice touch. that really kicks that into touch. nice job!!:beer:

Overall looks cool

Jay

added a little more surface detail to the fuselage.

17000 polys in the fuselage and + greebles
76000 polys total (lots of greebling on the engine)

Closer look at the canopy greebling