Mental Ray Fatal Error when rendering dense geometry

[veiledsongbird]

I receive a Fatal Error when I try to render a print quality image of my high poly model through Mental Ray (Maya 8.0, using Final Gather). I am able to render a print quality image of my high poly model using Maya Software renderer, but I'd really like to use Mental Ray. My computer specs are below if that helps. I have also uploaded a wireframe image of the model I am trying to render.

OS: Windows XP/SP2 32-Bit
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.60GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Page File: 1045 MB used, 3914 MB available
Graphics Card: Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition
Approx. Total Memory: 256.0 MB

Also, this model consists of several IGES files imported from Solidworks that are NURBS. Can Mental Ray handle high face counts? Are there any Render Settings/Windows XP settings I can change in order to render out a large image of my model? Any help you can provide will be immensely appreciated.

[Need_Help]

Can you please post a screenshot showing the error message? If your scene has millions of polygons, the problem may caused by insufficient RAM/system resource.

Thanks :)

[minimus]

it might be the poly count. do the model material containing anyreflections or somthing like that, becaus heavy lighting and reflections on a high quality printing render might crash....it surley does it to me. i tryd to render a scene with 2000x 2000 very high quality with reflections and all.....i can easy say it dint work out that good :P

[veiledsongbird]

Some of the materials (Blinn Shader) on my model do have reflections and I am using Final Gather (500 rays), but it turns out that the problem was with insufficient RAM. I added 2 more GBs of RAM to my computer and I am now able to render a print quality image of my model (TIFF with alpha channel, 8x11 @ 300 dpi). I also found out after it was installed that Windows 32-bit OS can only utilize 3 GBs of RAM.

I have attached a render of the model using Final Gather and Mental Ray.


I wanted to share this reply from someone at Northern Illinois Autodesk Animation User's Group:

"Any time I have gotten a Fatal Error with mr, it was when running on 32 bit machines and was due to memory limitations. Running a 32-bit version on a 64-bit machine with 4 gig memory, or using the 64-bit version, took care of the problem, but I was unable to render on my machines with the 32-bit OS.

The mesh doesn't look so dense that it shouldn't work. Try turning down some of the settings for Final Gather; that is most likely the source of the memory issue."

You can visit their forum here:
http://www.max3ds.com/index.php?name=Forums

Thank you so much for your help! You rock!!

[minimus]

good you figuret it out. i might buy vista later so i can have as many g ram i want inn the teory. but at the moment i stick with xp and 4g even if it only see 3g of ram.

the anti- aliasing is a bit poor on the model picture...what is it a model of?

[veiledsongbird]

When I saved the image in Photoshop I compressed it a little for uploading. I did however go back and check the full image when you mentioned that, just to make sure. Turns out the full image is okay.

It's a model of a physical therapy table.

[minimus]

ok. it boring when you need to compress the full image just to make it upload to this site.

but i understand now :) it looks really good.