I can not render a file with caustics. It will render without them, but when I enable them, it simply crashes. Any tips? 

Again I am not using this software as a hobby, I need to meet a deadline and this software is proving unreliable. I would appreciate any help.

 Hi Pinklet,

You're running a Mac, right? I'm not having any issues here on this Mac Platform. 

Usually issues like that can be object/shader specific and can be fixed. Sometimes it's as easy as rebuilding the shader itself. If you're cranking up the photon settings, sometimes in combination with other shader settings, they fight each other.

If the objects causing the issues, open it in the vertex modeler and make sure that it doesn't have bad topology/mesh closures. 

As always, maker sure that you're also running the latest version of Carrara - 6.2

Mark

 Thanks Mark,

It should be simple to figure out. It's a model of a bottle using the "replicator" feature. The funny thing is that it renders half way, so I am puzzled. But the caustics would be rendered on to the floor of my seen, I think that is where it crashes. I will attempt to render the object with out replication, and trouble shoot it from their.

Thanks again Mark.

 I tested it with one single instance of the bottle. It renders fine. The problem seems to be caustics + replicator. I will try to experiment with the numbers on the replicator and see if I am simply getting a bit over my head as to how much Carrara can handle.

Never rendered this way with caustic, but you can also try to convert the replicated object to realinstance, will eat a lot more memory but meybe dont crash.

 I am now starting to discover the mysteries of the replicator. Is their a command to do this?

My MacPro has 6 GB of RAM. It might be able to handle it.

 Yes, my second test also seems to be rendering. I think my problem was exceeding the number of instances, I literally had legions of bottles. I brought the numbers down, and so far it seems to have worked.  I am crossing my fingers.

Cool image, maybe was the number of replications that cause the crash...doing and learning!