I have a scene which renders fairly fast when I do test renders using Final at 800 x 600. There is no problem. However, when I go to render it using User settings, it will stop at 79 or 81 % and go no further. I have lowered everything. Below are the settingsI finally tried and even those didn't work. I unchecked multipass and lowered my Object antialiasing to 4 and 10 with 100%. I lowered both light quality settings to -1. None of this helps. I reinstalled Vue 7.5 xstream removing everything and even put on Vista 64-bit service pack 2. My video cards are GTX 280s and I put in the latest driver. I have 12 gig ram and a i7CPU.

I have not tried other scenes that I have rendered before, but I have never had this problem. I am using some of the Asilex Jungle plants, but they rendered on another render. Since I was working with a lot of fog, I was using a Volumetric atmosphere. Everything rendered quickly up to 50 %. But the plants are in the part that rendered quickly as well as the part that will not render and the water is also in both parts.

Everything else on the machine works fine. I have tried rendering to disk as well as to screen. I started out with higher settings on the render screen, but lowering all didn't make a difference. I even cleaned up a lot of the ecosystems and lowered the polygon count from over two million to a little over a million. Nothing has changed the situation. If it didn't render at 800 x 600 on Final, I would think that there was a problem with the file, but it does. I turned some jungle plants into Vobs after lowering their polygon count. Baking or not didn't make a difference.

Hope someone has an idea. I am stumped as this has never happened before. My normal renders take from 8 hours to about 16 depending on how high I set object and texture anti aliasing, etc. Here, as I said I unchecked texture and put object very low.

Thanks.

try the larger size at preview quality... it'll help tell you if its image size or settings, but i'm betting its image size...

Hi melika -

Thanks for the idea. 2000 x1250 stopped at 80%
1600 x 1000 stopped at 100% but the hour glass never left the screen
1024 x 640 finished.

Now what does not make sense to me ,anyway, is that I normally render at 2400 x 1500 or 1600 depending on the aspect ratio. A scene I did previously had similar scenery other than the atmosphere (same scene in a different perspective) and was larger in size as well as in polygon count and I did it using User with multipass rendering , etc. This scene worked perfectly at 2400 x 1500. It has over 2 mil polygons and is much larger MB wise than the one that will only render at 1024 x 640. The basic scenery is the same other than the atmosphere whose settings are higher.

I actually had a scene do this one to me, too... it was a complete puzzle to me.

Still is, actually - and I never managed to get it rendered large.  I think a large part of it, strangely, is the atmosphere and how it interacts with plants, water, and other objects.  If you think of it this way... for every pixel you see in a final image, the computer has calculated out THOUSANDS (if not more) of "light rays" to get the most accurate results... the more you boost your quality, or increase settings, the more calculations are required.  The larger the output, the more calculations are required as well.  You managed to give your computer a double "whammy" - as did I that day LOL.

Try using the Gbuffer and rendering to disc.  Try using the buffer to separate out objects seen in final render until you have everything you need and can composite them in photoshop or any other favorite editing software that allows multiple layers.... it might be a work-around for this.

Good luck =D
~meli

Edit:  thought of something... if you are using dynamic population ecosystem and/or a procedural terrain, THAT could be the issue as well....  many MANY more calculations are needed for the higher quality.

Do you use a complex dispacement function in the scene?
Did you try the external renderer? If you rendered to screen, what part of the scene becomes problematic, Anything special at 79%?

I have not added any displacement. I rendered an image at final at 640 x 480 and in Photoshop and put a black line to show where the render  stops. . Nothing that I can tell is different below the black line.

A appreciate this help. I would like to be able to use this image because I have plans for it in Photoshop. Also, when I print, I print to  a 13 x 19 inch paper and I like the image to have at least 2200 x ? pixels before I use Genuine Fractals. 

Indeed, doesn't seem to have anything different in this zone. I'm quite puzzled...

is that water in the bottom left corner?  if so - i found your "problem"  if that's water, do you have displacement on it?  if so... turn it off.  for that matter, turn off all displacement for now.

Also, if thats an infinite water plane - you dont need it.  try a cube, squished on up-down and stretched on depth & width, apply your materials, and viola - very realistic water from a cube - and cubes like displacement more than infinate planes.  just stretch it back as far as ... i would say to somewhere behind the little... pond? that i'm thinking i can see in midground (sorry, have a hard time seeing smaller images, and im not really awake yet)

another idea....in atmosphere......take GR down to GI or lower, GI down to AO or lower, take AO down to GA, and take GA down to Standard.  i'm thinking that scene is either a GI or AO, not radiosity...., so, click on the radial button that's above whichever one is ticked right now and try. 

very cool lookin so far, though...
~meli

Melikia may well be right :)

When "Bug" fixing such things, folks, as general note, do this:

STEP ONE
Save the scene out as a "Test" scene, so you don't screw up original.
Use a "standard" atmosphere with sun set to no shadows, no softness, 0% haze and fog (to remove any possible issues with the atmosphere).

STEP TWO
put EACH seperate item on it's own layer, this includes seperate layers for the Ground and water.
(and if any item is duplicated put the original and all duplicates on a layer together).
name each layer to help with identifying issues.

render only ONE layer at a time as visible to renderer and the rest "hidden from renderer" take note on paper which layers you've done.

This may help identify a specific item at fault

STEP THREE
If Step One this shows no specific problem, it maybe an issue with a conflict between items (which is harder to pin down), or the atmosphere . So you need to work on and consider this.

STEP FOUR
turn all layers to be visible to renderer.

Now, turn one layer at a time to be invisible to render.
repeat this with each layer to see a conflict. take notes on paper on what layers have been checked.

STEP FIVE
If still no issues, it maybe the atmosphere, load in your original atmosphere and try again as if all else has been eliminated it maybe the atmosphere.

STEP SIX
Hunting down a specific cause, once an item(s) has been indentified, save them out, now import into a "default" scene and work on the item to find the issue.

STEP SEVEN
Make 1 duplicate for EACH of the item's materials, so if it has 16 mats, make 16 duplicates
name each duplicate for a one specific material on the item, say "Window glass" or whatever.

STEP EIGHT
now, on each duplicate, make all materials but the named one, into the "defualt" Vue material, you're trying to isolate which material is the trouble maker.

STEP NINE
next, you can either do it the long way, render the scene out with only one duplicate at a time visible, or, make a very tall thin render with each item placed vertically above/below each other, so as a render goes down the column it will hit and crash on the "bad" one (can't do that with "preview" quality renders)

Another weirder issue could be memory. say you have a bad RAM chip, but it only shows up when a large amount of memory is used. This can show when using displacement as they use the most memory of all. Vista has a RAM checker utility by the way.

I learned that very neat, but very slow process of bug tracking from

A) games, of all things, hehe 
I've had RPG games where a single item in a character's inventory would cause a crash so my usual bug fix hunt would be dropping all of his gear, and picking up items 1 by 1 and checking to see which caused the bug

b) hardware fixing. Where you have to be VERY damn methodical to find a flaw in a PC (yes, it's usually the PSU or RAM chip, but OMG...hunting down obscure motherboard issues makes you cry, hehe).

WOW

I don't think i've ever seen such a complete list on how to resolve bug issues before... can you make this into one of your nifty tut's so we wont lose it in the archives of these forums?  My methods have been kinda hit & miss so far, but I'm like a dog gnawing on a bone with "issues"... i cant stop trying to figure something out.  a list to follow would help me stop getting sidetracked LOL.

thanks =D

and once again...

wow.

Melikia
sometimes I wonder whether I have Aspberger's to some degree...or whether it's just because Life throws so much *$@#^! crap at us all, I've decided to dig me heels in and bite back, one step at a bloody time!! ;)

Probably that mad Celt in me...."*FREEEEEEEEEDOM! From bugs, complex forms, tax mayhem, lawyers, politicians, knuckle-dragging nincompoops, Chinese furniture instructions in badly mistranslated Goggled English, etc etc!" *:D

hm okydoky will try and remember and do that then! :)

Thanks everyone for all the help. Using Melika's suggestion of rendering in preview mode to see if it will render, I found that anything with the atmosphere I had created would not finish rendering. I redid the atmosphere from scratch, and it renders in preview mode at 2400 x 1500 very quickly. I'll try later to render it using my settings and User mode.

I further think I found the exact culprit creating the renders not to complete. If I uncheck volumetric light, they render in preview mode at 2200 x 1350 (the last number is a guess). If I don't uncheck volumetric mode, they will not render at that resolution anywhere.

Why would unchecking volumetric light make a difference? The settings can be the same as I showed originally or I can change the clouds or amount of haze or fog. With volumetric light checked they will not complete a render at anything above I think I said 1650 or 1024.

Once again I have 12 gig of memory and a i7 cpu. The polygons are about 1.5 million. unchecked I can render a similar scene with 2.5 mil polygons.

you mean in the render settings ? the "optimise Volumetric" setting ?
I wonder if the optimisation algorithms are causing the problem.  Maybe there's something in there that causes the render engine to choke.

Frank -

I wrote UNCHECH to a screen capture I had previously made just to remind myself. Unchecking this made all the difference.

In the user render settings, there is a button for "optimize volumetric lighting" - make sure its off, then try your volumetric atmosphere, complete with the thing you had unchecked turned back on in the atmosphere tab.  If its still no go, then you found your solution (until another "update" happens and they change it around again LOL)

melika -

I looked at my original settings, optimize volumetric lighting was not checked in the render settings. I never have it checked.

Now that I think I found the problem, I just wish I knew why it was happening. I don't like to not know.

Thanks

i agree.. the not knowing why is very frustrating.

i still want to know WHY, after the first update, my "purge memory" REMAINS broken, useless, and doesnt purge SQUAT.  The first update broke it, and they refuse to fix it, no matter how much I complain.

that's weird, my purge memory works fine.  I'm using 7.4 on a 32 bit system though so that may be the difference

seems its broken on XP 64 systems mostly, a few vista 64 users have also had problems.