[Nvironment]

I have a large Architectural project in Sketchup that has been working very smoothly...generating several renderings per day with multilight, etc. I spent one day making modifications and now I am crashing during Vox process. Is this due to corrupt textures, or geometry? I didn't do anything tricky so I'm at a loss as to how to troubleshoot. I also have one or two scenes in the model that work so can't figure this out. I save a model version each day for backup purposes, so I can always lose a day and reconstruct everything I did over again scene by scene, but it would be nice to figure troubleshooting out as it seems to keep happening.

I am using Maxwell Render V3.0 with 3.0.1 SKP Plugin.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[JDHill]

It is not really possible to say what might be the cause without seeing a SKP file that exhibits the behavior. So depending on the file size, I would ask you to please either email one to me (jeremy at nextlimit dotcom), or upload one to dropbox or similar, so I can take a look and see what's the cause.

[Nvironment]

Sure...I will send it to you via Hightail...the file is >300MB. Are there any specific things to avoid when creating textures, etc to ensure no crashes occur?

[JDHill]

It depends if the crash is happening in FIRE in the plugin, or out in Maxwell Render. I'm assuming we're looking at the latter here, since you mention Multilight, which is also the first thing I'd check -- that you have not perhaps enabled Color + Intensity Multilight, and are running out of memory.

[Nvironment]

Correct, the latter...we don't use Fire for main models due to the size. I do have enabled Color + Intensity Multilight ... we also have about 20 different emitter materials in the model though most scenes process with those layers turned off to avoid render calculations. Model was sent to you...I'm sure it's something obvious that we are overlooking.

Thanks!

[JDHill]

Thanks, I'll take a look. In the meantime, please check that it is indeed not due to running out of memory from using Color + Intensity Multilight; as compared to a non-Multilight render; the memory it takes to do that is something like (amount for non-Multilight render) * (number of emitters) * (256), such that even with a good deal of memory on the machine, you can quite easily run out. For more information, please see here.

[JDHill]

I spent quite a bit of time looking through the scene, and find that it contains some geometry that is causing a problem in the render engine. I couldn't say precisely why it is, mainly because it is not really predictable: using different combinations of hiding/showing groups & components, the failure scenario pops into and out of existence. So, I have reduced it to as concise a test case as I could, and reported that to the developers concerned.

As far as fixing or working around this, here is one way I found:

• 1. Open the outliner and scroll to where the groups start.
  2. Expand the second group that has children (I'll just call it Group).
  3. Inside, you should find 9 instances of <Existing _Y_ Roof - Existing _Y_ Roof-293022-_3D_>.
  4. Hiding these instances, the issue should no longer occur.

Or alternatively:

• 1. As in step 2 above, expand Group.
  2. Hide all of its children.
  3. Select the faces it contains (the main shell of the building) and group them as Group Faces.
  4. Hide Group Faces, and unhide the children hidden in step 2.

This will also prevent the issue occurring. Neither seems to be to be something you can call a real solution, though; my instinct is that there is geometry somewhere in the file that is causing this, but only in conjunction with other geometry. In particular, the test case I generated does not involve geometry in these groups at all; rather, it consists solely of meshes and instances for the <Nerd barstool - 75 cm - by Muuto - designed by David Geckeler> component.

Unfortunately, that is about all I can tell you about this; I hope it helps somehow, while the developers look into the issue.

[Nvironment]

Thanks for the tips...I also found that simply exploding everything prior to the render works...though time consuming. I also turned off all isolated layers that needed no render.

[JDHill]

Just so you know, disabling instances in the Output tab is effectively the same as exploding the model, from a Maxwell standpoint.