MR crashing during render

[noar]

Hello all

This is my first post on de board. Glad to be online with you all

Here's my scene:
I have a robot walk cycle, animated. The grid on the ground has a MentalRay matte shader on it, in order to make it receive shadows, while not rendering the actual object. I also applied a MR background picture to be rendered at the back of the camera, lined up the ground plane with the image in the background, and presto, i've got a standard 3D over 2Dimage composite with proper falling shadows. I am using a MentalRay arealight (only one) for main illumination, and a standard spotlight with no shadowcast for fill.

Here's my problem:
The animation is 190 frames total.
While rendering the sequence, Softimage crashed at frame 32 (displaying a dialog box that said ray2.exe, illegal operation blah blah blah) so basically ray2.exe crashed on frame 32. Now when i tryed to re-render frame 32, it crashed again! When i tryed to render frame 33, it worked! but then on frame 47 it crashed! This went on and on, and out of 190 frames, it crashed on 11frames (with NO visible pattern). Also, in those particular frames, there wasnt anything different or special about them that would have caused them to crash, they were just the next frame in the walkcycle.

I dont really know what could be causing it. I assume it's mentalray (hence the ray2.exe crash)

Has anyone had this problem?
Does anyone have a solution?

I am running a Dual P3-800 with 512 ram on windows 2000 platform
Thanks for your time.

[richard-sher]

Do you have mental ray 1.9 installed as well? If so try rendering with that. If that's not an option, try adjusting the antialising a little or moving the camera a very small amount in any direction. If that does not work, try exporting an .mi file and use the ray standalone to render your scene.

Another thing you can try is forcing mental ray to use only one processor. Some shaders don't work will in a multithreaded environment. To do this, add this line to your setenv.bat
set SI_MI_TRACER=%SI_LOCATION%mental_raybinray.exe -threads 1

If all that fails, try a different computer. I've found that on rare occasions mental ray will crash on a scene(like yours) but only on one type of machine. If you've got access to an IRIX, Linux, Hp-Ux, Sun, etc.... machine running mental ray, I'd suggest that. At the least try a different win 2000 machine , maybe an NT machine?

Hope this helps.
Ed Harriss, http://www.EdHarriss.com
New Video! "SoftimageXSI: Mastering Materials"
Now Shipping - see Examples at EdHarriss.com

[noar]

Thanks for your help Ed, ill give those a try. unfortunately, My 2000box is the only one i have access to.

We are running SGI 02 boxes at school but they are HELLA slow and i dont have the patience for that [censored].

your post reminded me of another thing you'd proably be able to answer:

Does softimage|3.9/extreme or base, whatever, instantly recognize my dual processors? or do i have to tell it that i have two?

Thanks

[richard-sher]

Glad I could help.

mental ray will instantly recognize your dual processors. But if you want a multi threaded interface then you'll have to upgrade to XSI.

Ed Harriss, http://www.EdHarriss.com
New Video! "SoftimageXSI: Mastering Materials"
Now Shipping - see Examples at EdHarriss.com

[moss]

This happens to me a lot when I have bevelled extrusions with points that overlap. Try removing objects one by one and render that frame that crashes so you can determine which object it is. Hope this helps.