I have a scene with a number of static PRT’s rendered as voxels, basically im creating a clouds but Some of my renders are crashing at specific frames, and i am so far un able to figure out why, the particles load fine, not even close to reaching memory, or cpu limit, but as the voxels are being rendered, 3dsmax terminates, no warnings, just dumps to whole scene,
(the original particles were created in FumeFX, i have One light in the scene, i am overriding emission, and Absorption)
any work flow suggestions regarding voxel rendering or similar experiences would be great to hear
To be frank, I have never seen Krakatoa crash 3dsMax straight to desktop. Usually it pops up an error message, and just stops rendering gracefully, and you can save the scene and restart. So no, I have no idea why it might be failing in such a fashion.
Can you provide some more information about the exact versions of 3ds Max and Krakatoa you are using?
Hello Bobo, thanks for the response, it seems that the issue may be partly to do with scene scale, we have our system units set to cm’s and were working on a huge scene that’s miles long, I’m noticing that when ever I have my clouds scaled up to a big size and set the final pass density to something really high it crashes,
3ds Max can have significant problems with this type of units setup, but I was not aware that it would crash Krakatoa.
I will try to reproduce it here with some basic data, but if I cannot, I will ask you to provide a simple setup that crashes it for you…
Oh, you should not expect any successful rendering under those circumstances. What I would expect us to fix is to prevent the crash, and replace it with an error message.
If you want 3ds Max to work right, you must remember it has only 32 bit precision, and working in CM units when the distances are in Miles will generally cause problems. I have seen problems with other renderers on other projects, and the only sensible solution is to rethink the system scale settings.
Since the Krakatoa rendering is in a separate pass anyway, it shouldn’t be an issue to use a completely different scale settings for it. As long as the relative placement of particles and camera are retained, it should not matter for the compositing stage what the units were during rendering.
My first attempt to crash Krakatoa in voxel mode failed. I assume I did not have the right settings.
Can you please provide the following information (or a simple MAX file with a PRT Volume, a Camera, and the right Krakatoa settings to reproduce the crash)?
How large was your point cloud in scene units?
What was the average spacing of the particles?
Where in world space was the position of the particle object?
What was the .transform of the Camera rendering these particles (you can select the camera and type in $.transform in the MAXScript Listener)
When was the Voxel Size value in the render settings?
In my setup, I set System Units to CM, placed a Geosphere with radius of 10000.0 units at [-152823.234, -152823.219, 0], and filled with PRT Volume (Spacing 400.0). I rendered using a Camera with transforms (matrix3 [0.707107,-0.707107,0] [0.353553,0.353553,0.866026] [-0.612372,-0.612373,0.5] [-153093,-153093,125])
So my render output was not usable due to the poorly selected system units and the limited precision of 3ds Max, but it did not crash.
