[Tea_Bag]

unlucky man! - maybe its a setup in your scene forcing the crashes?

[Bubbaloo]

Maybe you should post in a new topic, instead of the "NL Promotional Offer" topic.

I would be curious to try to render one of your crash scenes if you want to send one to me in MXS format.

[Tea_Bag]

Good Idea Brian!

[choo-chee]

PM me your mail plz
be quick since I'm going home it about an hour .... for the weekend.

[Bubbaloo]

It's now rendered past S.L. 10. No crashes.
There are some caustics starting to show up. Do you have glass lenses over any emitters?
Also, you have no environment lighting. There is a visible part of the exterior which is showing black.
You have the z-clip plane set, but I don't understand why. The parameters you set don't allow the clipping edges to show in the render.

It's a nice scene. I think your first action would be to find out what's causing the caustics and eliminate that. Then I would add some kind of environment lighting, preferably an hdr (clears faster). I'll keep looking and see if I can find anything else.

I'm going to do a ML test next to see if I can determine which emitter is creating those caustics.

[choo-chee]

I wonder, what's your hardware? maybe something in my PC's is not good? none of the 4 PC's I have passes SL 8. And about the emitters: yes it's a reflector styled spots (to get "ies" patterns...)

[Bubbaloo]

It's Vista 64 bit, 16 GB RAM, dual quad Xeon 5355, 275 GTX.

[zdeno]

nice piece of hardware there BB

[choo-chee]

yeah. well did it render to a nice SL, like 20?

[Bubbaloo]

I think it got up to around 12 before I stopped it.

[choo-chee]

so I guess it's better than in my computers yet I can't be sure it's perfect... wonder why I can't get it to render.

[dmeyer]

Are you keeping an eye on temperature? If you're machine is getting too hot that could cause issues.

[choo-chee]

my PC's are overclocked but with decent cooling (huge fans, lots of them...)

[Mihnea Balta]

Does it happen when the computer isn't overclocked?

[choo-chee]

I'm gonna check it since I recall some scenes did render good to high SL. however since I'm getting only about 50% of the scenes to render (and most are interiors) I can't rely on luck