IPR and render problem. HELP!

[viper-0711-2]

1) I'm using maya 4.0 and find that the IPR sometimes is very unstable, it will halt the system when the scene is complex or when u try to tweak certain parameters e.g. on/off shadow maps for complex scenes.

just wonder if maya 4.5 or maya 5 got a more stable IPR, or with better fucntions like region IPR, etc

2) in fullr render or batchrender, Maya sometimes quit with "exception found, rendering aborted" error or "memeory exception". I have no idea what to fix when these error happens. any workarounds??? it make my rendering sheduyle very problematic!!!

thanks

[blake]

Yes, IPR is very memory intensive. I use 5.0 and it is even worse because Maya 5 needs more memory to run. I understand that they are working on this. I would suggest that you don't save images in the render view since that holds even more RAM. The simple fix is to get more RAM. I would also optimize your scene as much as possible so that it doesn't hold so much in RAM (textures, layered shaders) while it is rendering. Outside of that you are dealing with the fact that IPR is a very old program and has some "known issues."

[chadrik]

when using the batch renderer from the command line you can specify the bucket size. the bucket size is the number of little chunks it divides the image up into while it is rendering (i'm sure you have noticed when using the render view that new portions of the render appear in regular squares). if maya chooses too large of a bucket size the render can crap out. try taking a look at the batch render flags. they are under the rendering utililtes section. they moved stuff all around in the most recent maya help files so i can never find anything anymore, but i know that it's there.

good luck

[deke-kincaid]

in fullr render or batchrender, Maya sometimes quit with "exception found, rendering aborted" error or "memeory exception". I have no idea what to fix when these error happens. any workarounds??? it make my rendering sheduyle very problematic!!!

32bit apps/os can only allocate 1.5-2 gig(1.5 gig in reality, 2 gig on paper) of ram to any one application(ram and virtual memory). So if your scene is using above 2 gig it will give you that memory exception thrown. This is especially bad on windows(linux uses 1/4th to 1/2 the amount of ram on the same scene in maya). You can have 8 gigs of ram or a 4 gig swap disk and this will still happen because of the 32 bit limitation.

The bucket size is one was as Chadrik mentioned. Also a few other things that will help getting your memory usage down:
1. Convert your textures to BOT files. They are extremely efficient and use very little ram. Look for pixho's nice BOT convert script.
2. Shadow maps use huge amounts of ram. Anything above 2-3k on window will instantly give you a memory exception(linux/irix easily handles 8k maps with no issues).