Hi I'm having big problems trying to render a scene including 7 poser figures and a water plain at admittedly high resolution - I've tried 800cm x 300cm, 600cm x 300cm and now 500cm x 300cm at 72dpi. I am rendering to disk using a dual 2.5 Ghz PowerPC G5 with 4.5 GB DDR SDRAM. The renders take between 7 - 5 hours (so not necessarily a long render and everything seems OK up until the last moment (at the point where the render reaches100%) when it crashes producing a message saying there is a fatal error and saying Vue Infinite will try to retrieve the file and reopen. When the file reopens there is no "resume Render' option and the render is lost it seems. This is very frustrating and I am getting worried because I have to produce 4 similar renders for work that goes to the printers in a week. Is there anthing I can do to emsure the render works? Is the purge memory function any use? It seems vue infinite will not let me interrupt and save the renders (it says I do not have enough virtual memory to do this). Any advice as usual gratefully received? I'm starting to panic again. I like Vue Infinite but its certainly nerve-wracking

Render it in tiles and put it together in post or render it at a lower resolution.

Cobraeye - could you explain what you mean by render in tiles. I have tried various methods of doing this without much success

There are a few strategies you can use to conserve memory for very large renders.

• Simplify your scene
      Simplify your materials. Reduce the resolution of bitmap textures for distant objects. Remove bump for distant objects. Reduce resolution of distant objects.

• Render in layers
      Select a few objects and use 'render selected objects' or 'render visible objects' and composite your image at the end with Photoshop or equivalent

• Render in tiles
      Select an area on your main camera viewport and render only that areas. Repeat for other part of the image, making sure you have overlap between tiles. And put together the fragments in Photoshop.

Could you post a small render of your scene ?

That could help other advise better strategies around it.

Make sure the path you selected for render to disk is really there - Vue will create the file, but if the folder isn't there it has a problem.  

Also don't have a file there with the same name (filename.tif) and save/render again using the same name - Vue doen't like to overwrite files.  

Thanks for the advice Agiel - will try rendering tiles - is this using 'select render area'? Only problem with this is it will only render to screen so I have to render in small tiles - but this may be my only option The render selected objects option is a problem because it always renders the sky as well the object and so takes a long time. I haven't worked out how to render isolated individual objects with the correct lighting without the sky (this would be very useful)! Peggy - I was definitely overwriting previously failed renders, so maybe this was a problem? i have included a low res version of the image in case anyone has any other advice john

Could be, since the render was getting to 100% before crashing.  What file type are you saving as?  Do you have enough disk space/write access to where the file is going?

I'm saving as psd without alpha mask or depth map - the rendered file is being saved to a HD with 175 GB free space - so should be OK i'd have thought - i'm not sure how you check or change the write access?

You can definitely simplify your scene by using low polygons poser figures for the characters in the background or by simplifying their geometry ('bake to polygons' if you are using Vue infinite) and their textures.

You can also put the figures in the background in one layer, the car in another layer, and the figures in the foreground in a third layer... render each layer eparately and combine the final result.

That could help making your scene easier to handle for your system.

Thanks agiel I will definately try to follow your advice - I have a few more questions (I apologise if they are obvious). 1] to simplify geometry: I select the object then object/bake to polygons - yes? 2] How do I simplify textures? Do I have to do this in Poser? 3] is there a way to render layers without rendering the sky (whilst keeping the correct lighting)?

1. Yes... Bake to Polygons and select a low amount of polygons.

Save before doing it because sometimes you can get odd results. You may have to save each figure as individual .vob objects, open them one at a time in a new scene, reduce their geometry, save them and reimport them into your main scene using 'replace by'.

1. Depends what you use for your material.

If they are bitmaps, edit the bitmaps in photoshop and reduce their size. Or better... with figures that far off in the background, you can replace them by procedural materials with the same color tones. nobody will see the difference.

1. Multipass rendering

Add a check mark to each object mask or layer mask you want to render. Leave out the rest, including the sky. That way you will have characters rendered with the correct light but no sky.

thanks again agiel - but if I use multipass rendering does that mean i can only render to screen?

You are right.... I forgot about that.

You still have the option to render only selected layers. Maybe you could try to block out the sky using a very tall, white plane ? sort of like a the green screen in special effects of movies.

OK this is getting very stressful. Complete renders are continuing to fail. Always after 100% is reached and it is writing the file. This is very nervewracking because you don't know until last second. I DON'T UNDERSTAND!!! This happens even when I render specific objects. I can render to screen 'selected areas ' but very small tiles - this will take a long time and will be difficult to put together in photoshop.

would it help if I install the latest update of vue infinite? or might that make things worse??

I had similarly problem with my VUE :  :cursing:

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