Irradiance particles fatal error

[andystopps]

Has anyone had problems with memory allocation warnings followed by the "mental ray has encountered a fatal error and been disabled" box when using irradiance particles? I've been trying V7 with a scene created in version 6.02 and even with most of the geometry hidden, memory limit set and so on, I still get the above.

[JavierV]

Same here: fatal error.
The scene was created in xsi7 from scratch.
mia_Physical_sun
mia_Physical_sky
two mia_portal_lights
If I switch the IP on, bang, no more mental ray for the rest of the session.

guesses anyone?

greets
Javier

[chemkid]

hi,

i have the same problem with IP.

scenesetup with physical sun and physical sky. 4 portal lights. ONLY mia-materials used!!
when i switch off the portal lights i can generate and render the IP. but...

only low settings, no importon bounces. (0 passes, 64-256 rays for IP and env, always, 32 points)

too sad, since this is an indoor scene and the portal lights would really contribute.

- whenever i try higher settings, more IP rays or importon bounces the render crashes with memory allocation warnings!

- with portal lights switched on i get the same errors.

a description for a working IP setup would be nice.

maybe this IP feature is somewhat unfinished... (not ready?) i read something on xsibase, i would be nice to have more official information.

something like:

IP does work with 64bit only or make sure to switch on this and that for a working IP scene.

the IP-tutorial provided by mental images is pretty interesting but as always... some notes from softimage for a setup INSIDE xsi would be helpful.

i'm testing this feature on 32bit windows xp pro with xsi7 ess. 2 gb ram... for a 800x600px-test enough.

if somebody's interested in my scenesetup and successful renderings. please pm.

have fun,

chem!

[Eisen]

xsi crashes for me with the default settings... works fine though when i lower the number of rays to 50.... havent tried yet what the upper limit is..

[chemkid]

hi there,

i successfully rendered a IP scene. with 1024 rays, env off (1 active portal light), accuracy always with 64 points AND importon density 0.1!!! zero point one!!! why!!!

the importon map is related to the imagesize i guess, that's why the density is on it's default settings with "1" much to high for 1500x800px... for my 2 gb ram that is... hmmm?

anyway, it's working and looking good. i'll post the images later, if someone's interested.

chem!

[Leo3D]

i'm interested to check it

i've the same problem,
i feel IP module XSI 7 isn't finish , too mush crashs

[Stereo]

i only tryed it a while ago, is IP extremely slow?
FG + GI is much faster for me..

when i check the i3d news video he said new to mental ray 3.6 is also irradiance particles,
much faster and better, or something he said.....

but when i tryed it, first it was so extremely slow, i canceled at 25% or something,
next time it crashed

[Eisen]

i only tryed it a while ago, is IP extremely slow?
FG + GI is much faster for me..

when i check the i3d news video he said new to mental ray 3.6 is also irradiance particles,
much faster and better, or something he said.....

but when i tryed it, first it was so extremely slow, i canceled at 25% or something,
next time it crashed

my understanding, and from what i've seen from my tests...

you generate your IP map once, this is extremely slow and will take a bit.. .even in tutorials i've seen numbers like 7 hours or so...
after you have generated your map, you can disable the actual generation of it, and then mental ray will render the pictures nearly instantly. at least thats what actually also happened in my tests...

[Stereo]

my understanding, and from what i've seen from my tests...

you generate your IP map once, this is extremely slow and will take a bit.. .even in tutorials i've seen numbers like 7 hours or so...
after you have generated your map, you can disable the actual generation of it, and then mental ray will render the pictures nearly instantly. at least thats what actually also happened in my tests...
is that very usefull then?
maybe if you want some interior renders, but 7 hours, wouldnt it be faster with FG+GI anyway?

and what if you change something in the scene, or got something animated..?
will it have to recalculate on every frame then?

[Eisen]

is that very usefull then?
maybe if you want some interior renders, but 7 hours, wouldnt it be faster with FG+GI anyway?

and what if you change something in the scene, or got something animated..?
will it have to recalculate on every frame then?

like stated before my understanding is still rather limited, but as far as i see it, its mostly for stuff like animated fly throughs, of course where only the camera is moving... getting stuff like that flicker free with fg and gi is often nearly impossible, and this is where IP would really shine...

[andystopps]

I wonder whether they mean that IP are fast to set up (fewer interrelated settings, etc.) rather than fast to execute; the same kind of idea as the unbiased renderers, where you just push the button, go away and know that eventually it'll give you the result you want (if it doesn't crash first, of course).

[trollett]

I wonder whether they mean that IP are fast to set up (fewer interrelated settings, etc.) rather than fast to execute; the same kind of idea as the unbiased renderers, where you just push the button, go away and know that eventually it'll give you the result you want (if it doesn't crash first, of course).
When I first read about it I got the impression of it to be fast to set up push a button and get a nice picture. And after a few tests, it seems to be exactly like that. ;)

[RemyAlex]

Hello gang,

I made few tests of the new irradiance particules algorithm.

Basic purpose : day light simulation without any additional light, no comp, no background, no photoshop.

MR Sky + MR Sun + Portal Light + IP + mia_Material + Photographic Exposure...

http://ls3d.free.fr/bmp/Day_Test.jpg

Here a test on a basic animation :
http://ls3d.free.fr/bmp/Test_IP.mov

Once IP map is calculated (about 6 hours), it's 12 minutes per frame to render (AA min=0 max=2 Samp. = 0.05, mitchell = 3)

Never crash on my hand with this scene (with pretty high settings)

Cheers,

[trollett]

Looking good RemyAlex!
I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but when I try this method everything just turns black. Could you please guide me through your workflow when setting this up? It would be very appreciated!

[RemyAlex]

hi,

To get more bounces and brighter results, increase Irradiance Particules>Indirect passes and/or Photon Global>Diffuse bounce (2 parameters, weird?).

Also, increase Irradiance Particules>Intensity (The global scale factor for the intensity of the irradiance during rendering). Note that you can tweak this parameter after IP calculation without needed to rebuild it.

let me know,
bye

[trollett]

I did not realize that you could play with the intensity after the calculation, stupid me. :) Thanks a lot for the help, I will test it more though cause I'm still not thrilled with my results.

Cheers

[JavierV]

Hello again
Getting a bit down from all the crushes, as soon as i try to adjust anything... MR disabled for the rest of the session...
This feature seems to work fine in Max/Maya. I wonder how much of the problem could be XSI and how much my system (dual core - dual Xenon 2gb ram)
Irradiance Particles is the main reason I jumped into the upgrade offer
RemyAlex: could you be so incredibly kind and let us have your scene to see if I can render it in my system? (you could take out any shaders-models... that you don't want me to have/see)
It will go a long way to help me either wait longer until softimage releases an update/more instructions or some one does a tutorial, or look into my system and see what should be changed.
Thanks for your help.

Javier

[JavierV]

A little update:
I was rendering a scene with the following settings:
mia sun and sky + portal lights + IP
I gave all objects a very boring whitish Architectural Material with no reflections (phong looking)

For the Irradiance Particles
Accuracy:
Indirect Passes: 0
Rays: 100 (I am starting low because I am experimenting when are the crashes happening)
Intensity: 1 (this is not so important: can always be changes after successfully saving a good map)

Interpolation:Always --> 64

No enviroment rays (portal lights are used and it is recomended then not to fire them then in the manual)

For the importons:
Density: 0.4
Diffuse bounces: 0

Everything went fine.
Then I tried to increase the Diffuse Bounces to 1. Bang. Mental Ray gives a memory allocation problem and is disabled for the rest of the session. XSI must be close if I want to render or preview

So I went and manually deleted the ipmap and restarted XSI: it worked.
It seems that MR can't either rewrite or append to the file.

I have been increasing the values of the difffuse bouces and indirect passes one by one and rendering out each without the problem again.
Now I am up to 4 diffuse bounces and 2 indirect passes.

Tips:
1. If you are experimenting with Irradiance Particles be aware of the render region: there seems to be a bug somewhere and if you change the Rays value while a render is in progress, xsi may hang, just set autorefresh off.
2. I really don't know the difference between the diffuse bounces and the indirect passes but it seems the diffuse bounces keep bouncing an importon and the indirect passes adds another pass (increasing the rendering time much more) for indirect lighting. So basically increasing difuse bounces doesn't "cost" as much as increasing the indirect passes.
3. Keep your render region a reasonable size.

I continue experimenting now.
I am going to try to increase the rays.

Breathing deeply and slowly.
Javier

[JavierV]

Some more tips:

Increasing/Drecreasing the portal light multiplier brings more/less colour from the sky into the scene.

Increasing/Drecreasing the sun light multiplier increases decreases the overall light intensity in the scene.

don't forget (like I did) the multiplier of the mia_sky: bring it down to avoid strong colour cast from the sky and to bring the light down to a more natural level. Portal lights "bring into the scene" the information from the eviroment (mia_sky) so you still have to tweak the sky settings.

More bounces and passes and less light strength/multiplier values produce much better results.

[JavierV]

Ok: I seem to be able to slowly increase the rays

When turning on the enviroment part in the Irradiance Particles it crashes to start with.
I lower the rays and delete the ipmap and it crashed again.

I only get away with it -but it works :shifty:-if I use a much smaller render region (maybe it would be ok through batch rendering -MR manages memory much better then) but it makes it so hard to fine tune.

And let me tell you, now is when it starts looking good just with 10 rays!! Though it adds a lot of colour from the sky (must fine tune mia_sky when using the eviroment rays)

Now here comes the weird part: once you get it going with the small render region (otherwise it crashes) it doesn't mind if you enlarge it after a succesful attempt, go figure, maybe then it has a nicer time with the ipmap, or feels warm and fuzzy inside. Obviously MR has some quirks/bugs with the memory managment. At the end the ipmap in the Render_pictures is only 15megs?!!?


Then reason why i turn the enviroment on is because I am trying to match the settings that I saw in CG society (even though the Portal light are bringing the eviroment in, confusing, eh?)
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=621727
and he is using the enviroment too. And also Maya has problems when rendering large formats. Mmmmm....

Maybe a way to get around having to delete the map is to increase the frame number, or change the name every time or kick softimage in the right place so they fix it :-) just remember to delete so many maps afterwards.

Now trying using enviroment rays but no portal lights: (for the sake of the experiment) to see if the enviroment rays bring the color in from the sky and it reduces the burning of the surfaces close to the portal lights --> The expected result: the whole scene darkens because the Portals are not bringing the light in though not too much. (I am only using 10 enviroment rays, I will try with more to see how it compares to the portals... )

I will repeat the experiments and get pics this time but, well, now is time for bed or the beginning of a divorce agreement :-) (this took a whole day):oops:

I am happy there seems to be a way -a long one, though- around it. Please Softimage look into it. Just imagine us with very bruised knees from beggin' kneeling on a wet floor from our tears, bold from pulling our hair out which can't be replaced with ICE -which seems to be taking all of your attention.:whistling:

RemyLex: please, please, please let me have your scene!!

Hasta la vista
Javier

[RemyAlex]

Hi,

I can share the scene (http://ls3d.free.fr/bmp/IP_share.rar) of this image (all objects get the same white material except windows and curtains), so people can play with it and give feedback :
http://ls3d.free.fr/bmp/IP_test.jpg
Who is going to get the better/faster IP map?
;)

EDIT : The primary scene is from http://www.evermotion.org/tutorials/mich/, i just made some little changes / cleaning on it.

[M-TUNE]

thanks for share.!!

[JavierV]

RemyAlex: thank you very much!!!

I will post my results soon!
Can't wait to try.

Thanks, thanks, thanks

Javier

[tawat sangsuk]

RemyAlex .i has been test you scene from download
but i can't rendering ..it's to mush crashes.
..some thing like "error can't Located at mem..000000..bra..bra."
i've been try many way but it still crashed ..can't rendering.with IP

My com spec
Intel core 2 Quad Q9550
3G of Ram
Nvidia Geforce 96000 GT

Help me and thanks for share..

[RemyAlex]

Hi,
I can't really help, try to decrease rays ans interpolation to reduce IP calulation (so render quality). My renders were done on a Bi-XEON 2.66GHZ, 4 Go RAM, XP 64.