I have a 5400 px by 2700 px image with 9.8 million polygons that I want to render using User Settings and 60% advanced effects quality. I don't even have any DOF or other fancy stuff going on in this picture. I do have one Poser figure with one piece of dynamic clothing on, but no dynamic hair. The picture renders fine at lower resolutions, but not at 5400 x 2700 (i.e. 18" x 9" x 300dpi). I have tried everything and can't get Vue 5 Infinite (latest patch) to render it without it crashing. I have tried using the render area with areas as small as 270 x 270 and it still dies. I have tried splitting all the elements into layers and rendering visible layers one at a time and it still crashes on each layer. I have a P4 dual core 775socket 3GHz system with 4GB of RAM. I have 120 GB of drive space and I even tried marking the Vue Infinite exe with imagecfg.exe (a Microsoft utility) to use the 3GB space that Windows XP SP2 can give it when you use /4GB in the boot.ini, which I've also done. Am I stuck with only rendering lower resolutions to get this 18" x 9" size that I want? Is Vue 5 Infinite so full of bugs that it can't handle rendering this size picture even on a system like mine? Any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated. Sincerely, Chris Everett, WA USA

The Poser character might be the problem. You could try and save it as .vob, maybe this would help, although you'll lose the Poser link. Maybe it's the huge texture maps used for the character. Do you get an error message? I know I tried a very big render once, and Vue told me that my system couldn't handle it.

Thanks for the reply, bruno021. After your suggestion, I tried converting all the Poser objects in my scene to low res polygon objects (using bake to polygons) because they are away from the camera enough to not make a difference. The polygon count stayed close to 9.8 million. Still the same problems. I also posted my message to e-on's forum and Eric Holbrook (a great Vue artist in my opinion and one who I admire) posted a reply which basically says that I was right - Vue simply has too many bugs to handle rendering my scene at the resolution I desire. It is very sad that such a creative program can't handle this. I guess I'll seek out another program.

Well, 10 million polys is more that huge, imho. Try the Carrara 5 pro demo, and see if it can handle it, but I doubt it.

According to Eric Holbrook, C5Pro handles it with no problem and memory to spare. My experience is that similar stuff in other programs poses no problem. I can only get up to 200 dpi in Vue after converting the Poser objects to polygons. I'll keep it at that. Future projects will probably be done in another program, however.

I was suggesting you save the Poser figures as vob, not baking them to polygons. Vob is the format for Vue objects, and renders faster. Anyway, seems like you made up your mind. I'm having problems with the C5Pro demo with imported Poser anims. The interface just freezes, and I have to close the app with windows task manager.

I tried converting them to VOBs and it didn't have any effect. In fact the only time I was able to get Vue 5 Infinite to render the scene is when I converted the Poser objects to low count polygons. My past experience with Carrara was that it was junk. However that was long ago with v1. I gave up on it then. I'm sorry to hear you are having instability problems with v5. Perhaps I may stay away from Carrara too.

...I mean getting it to render above 100dpi at 200dpi. That was the max. But I couldn't get anything above 100dpi until I baked the Poser objects to low count polys.

I'm pretty sure it's a texture problem, but there isn't much to do about it, unless you get SkinVue2, and swap Poser textures for Vue procedurals.

Attached Link: http://www.cornucopia3d.com/overview.php?sel_dir=Tools&level=0&sel_type=Tools

dont forget the poser6 plugin aswell if its a p6 character youre using, skinvue2 only ships with the daz plugin.

Message edited on: 03/04/2006 07:42

Since I have only 1 GB of RAM I often run into this resolution problem. I found that I could go to higher resolutions by rendering smaller pieces of the picture (with the render area option) and putting them together afterwards in a photoshop-type program. I don't know how far you can push it with this method and it is a pain in the ****, but maybe it helps.

Thanks for the reply. Already tried that - see my original message. Vue still crashes even doing a render area as small as 270 x 270 !

Do you render to screen or to disk? I think Vue can render larger picture when rendering to disk. It is possible to render large picture, giacomo costa (as an instance)render picture to print on plate of more than 5 meters long, so I think he renders in more than 800x600 :-)

Tried both when not using rendering areas. Of course due to design limitations in Vue, you can't render areas to disk.

I didn't have the impression rendering to disk is much of an advantage anyway. And since you can't render areas (why?!?) it is actually quite a disadvantage. It must be a problem deep inside the algorithms of vue. I was able to render huge pictures without any problem and with lightning speed as long as they contain only vue native objects (like plants). I guess the problems only became visible when people were starting to import poser objects with their huge texture maps. And the error seems not even to be reproducible. There is an area of resolution in which vue crashes SOMETIMES (render the same picture, one time it works one time not). I'm afraid e-on is not going to be able to fix this bugs in the next times. I guess you also tried that, but what helps is restarting vue or even the computer before rendering. That clears the memory. But it only helps to get you A LITTLE MORE resources. I guess it is not enough for you.