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Too Many Displacement Maps Crashing Maya 2010 Mental Ray?

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#1

I would assume many artists have already come across this issue, but I am crashing Maya 2010 with too many displacement maps. I have about 26 or so objects I would like to apply displacement maps to.

I already reduced the size of all the maps (except one, character itself) to 1024, the one larger map is only 2048.

Also, I am using the Mental Ray Approximation Editor. My settings are set to spatial, with 3 minimum and 5 maximum subdivisions. Fine is checked.

Does anyone know a way to utilize displacement with many objects in a scene without crashing Maya?

Also, I have some ideas that might help but I am not sure and have not spent the time yet to investigate. I am thinking…

I could try reducing the size of most displacement maps to 512 instead of 1024…

I could try using lower settings in the Mental Ray Approximation Editor…

I could un-check the 32 bit displacement and just use 16 bit…

I could also try exporting the base mesh at a higher level and only use normal maps instead of displacement (I prefer the detail with 32bit displacement maps if possible.)

Any help is greatly appreciated!
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#2

It is happening only on render time, right?
If so you might be running out of ram?
Did you tried converting the displacement maps to .map files?
And I think lowering the Approximation would also help.

I’m not a pro, so you might want to wait for a second opinion :wink:

#3

Thanks Milko Stoev I will give that a try. Thank you for the reply.

#4

milko stoev you were right! Have you already battled this issue? I lowered my approximation editor settings and it rendered. Now I need to fine tune it and push it as far as I can before it crashes! hahaha :lol:

Also I looked at your art and your website, you are an amazing artist! The bike is one of your recent projects huh? Its looking awesome. Thanks again for the help.

#5

Thank you for the kind words!

The credit should go to Ryan Kingslien or Scott Patton + Maya Help file, don’t remember who’s tutorial it was :wink:

#6

That did help the issue, and got me to at least render. Thanks again.

I also found ways to get the maximum out of Maya. Here is what worked for me.

In Render Settings: Go to the Features Tab

Under Rendering Features, set the Primary Renderer to Raytracing.

Next under the Quality Tab: Go to Raytracing>Acceleration> and set the Acceleration Method to BSP2

This seems to handle larger meshes and faster render times. The original problem was this exact message:
“// Error: Fatal (mental ray) : mental ray encountered a fatal error. The system may have become unstable. Please save the scene and exit Maya.”

I hope this can help for anyone who encounters this problem.