Lightwave Freezing/Crashing after KRAY Prerendering Stage

[DDA010]

I'm having an issue with KRAY crashing Lightwave while rendering. Here's the situation;

I have an outdoor scene that uses a 45000 poly plane with a deformation applied to create a mountainous landscape, and am using KRAY Instancing to create trees spread about the scene. Previously, before using this method, I had manually placed some trees about and had a hand-crafted, slightly lower poly ground plane, and everything rendered fine (about 20 minutes per render.) Now, though, the render proceeds up to the Prerendering phase, but after that when it is supposed to show the render progress, it stops at 0% and does not go on. If I try to move the window around at all or click in LW anywhere, I get a (Not Responding) in the top of the window bar. If I try to close the KRAY render preview window, Lightwave crashes to desktop.

Also, at one point a co-worker worked on the scene and may or may not have tried a plugin called DP Instance (http://dpont.pagesperso-orange.fr/plugi ... tance.html) to instance the trees. I don't know if it is still active or is somehow conflicting with KRAY Instance but I think it might be, since when I go to object properties for the trees and disable KRAY Instance, the scene still renders with the trees (tested in Photon Estimate mode which doesn't crash) but still will crash in normal Photon Mapping mode.

Is there a known issue with anything similar to this? I'm not really sure what to do from here. I have LW 10 64-bit, KRAY 2.4, and my system specs are as follows;

Windows 7 SP 1
Intel Core i5-2500 CPU @ 3.30GHz
12.0 GB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6670 (Drivers from 11/9/11)

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Actually I just figured out that the reason the trees were showing up even when I disabled KRAY instance was because there were 2 layers of KRAY Instanced trees, and I had only turned off one of them. With the trees totally off, the ground only scene renders fine (and fast!!) So the trees are causing the crashing... but why? They are 2500 polys each, and seem to be instancing across 6300 points... so 15,750,000 polys, plus the 45000 from the background is 15,795,000 polys. I guess that would be enough polygons to crash Lightwave? I feel like I have rendered objects and scenes with more polys than that though... I will try creating a sub-500 poly version of the tree and see what that does. Will edit again if that fixes it!

[jure]

Did you assing Kray surface options shader to your trees materials and turned off caching irradiance?

[DDA010]

Hi Jure,

Yesterday I reduced the tree models to 500 polys each (down from 2500) and it actually rendered and didn't crash; however, it took 8 hours to render and when I arrived at work this morning all the trees were messed up; they were bright white (see attached image below.)

Broken low poly trees :(

I did not know about the shader options, I am trying it with the full-poly trees now with those applied, and Cache Irradiance turned off. I clicked render about 5 minutes ago and it seems to still be stuck at "Rayracing in Progress (768x768)" Do I need to change any of the shader options settings? Is there anything else I can try?

EDIT: The render just progressed to 0%, but it seems to be hanging up there; it may or may not crash, but obviously this is not ideal. I have gotten far faster render times with KRAY in the past... could it really just be an issue of too many polys? Is there a way to get KRAY to calculate only the polys viewed by the camera? It seems like it may be trying to calculate many trees which are off-screen.

EDIT 2: 2%! So its actually working for real now; your suggestion seems to have helped at least. Time remaining is about 8 hours currently though, which seems somewhat high for a still frame... so if there's anything you can suggest before the end of the day today please let me know!

Thanks for the help!!

[jure]

Something is wrong with your object. The shader for the trees must be set like this:

[DDA010]

Hey again Jure,

Thanks for the reply. That last render worked, took about 12 hours total. Below see the finished image!

The only problem? My boss wanted more trees. So after doubling the amount of trees and leaving it to render for a long weekend (from Friday to Tuesday) I'm back in the office today & the render STILL had about 4 days 4 hours estimated remaining? So there's still a problem apparently...

Would uploading my full KRAY settings help? What else could affect render time so much? It pretty much locks up at 0% again... not sure what to do!

Thank you again for all your help!

[jure]

Please upload your .lws file. Those render times are waay too long for normal render unless you are using relly old computer.

[DDA010]

Ok - attached is the .lws file. I know they are way too long, but my computer is very very new (specs below)

Windows 7 SP 1
Intel Core i5-2500 CPU @ 3.30GHz
12.0 GB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6670 (Drivers from 11/9/11)

Let me know what you come up with.

Thanks!

[jure]

Ok - attached is the .lws file. I know they are way too long, but my computer is very very new (specs below)

Windows 7 SP 1
Intel Core i5-2500 CPU @ 3.30GHz
12.0 GB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6670 (Drivers from 11/9/11)

Let me know what you come up with.

Thanks!

Ok try this:

1. set all luminosity on your materials to 0%
2. in Kray general tab select "Cache Irradiance"
3. On FG tab select Exterior preset and then change Passes to 1.

[jure]

Ok - attached is the .lws file. I know they are way too long, but my computer is very very new (specs below)

Windows 7 SP 1
Intel Core i5-2500 CPU @ 3.30GHz
12.0 GB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6670 (Drivers from 11/9/11)

Let me know what you come up with.

Thanks!

Ok try this:

1. set all luminosity on your materials to 0%
2. in Kray general tab select "Cache Irradiance"

Luminosity should only be used on materials that act as lights.
3. On FG tab select Exterior preset and then change Passes to 1.

[DDA010]

Hi Jure!

That seemed to do the trick! You know I didn't even think about luminosity as the culprit, LW must've been freaking out trying to calculate millions of minute lighting solutions for every polygon of every tree. The tree models were purchased off TurboSquid and must have had Lum applied already - I didn't even notice!

The first render I tried after implementing your suggestion has about 10 minutes remaining (60%.) WAY better!!!

Thanks again for all your help. You have just saved my company's project

[jure]

You are welcome.