Hi,
I'm getting this message that pops up during a full render:
AN UNKNOWN ERROR OCCURED IN TRACE-RAY
AN UNKNOWN ERROR OCCURED IN TR-BUCKETRENDER
Anyone know what this means or how to fix it??
Thanks,
3DSFX
I can't quite recall what causes this (might be worth doing a search in the forums), but it doesn't always cause a problem for the finished render. Did your render finish OK?
Hiya Dom,
I'm not sure yet. I'm doing a test render right now but even with my quad core OC'd to 3.9Ghz and still only doing 1\4 of the scene it's been crunching it for 3 hours and it's still not done! So at this point I cant speak as to the quality of the render yet. :(
This sounds like it may be a memory problem. You can try reducing the size of the subdivide cache. This is in the render tab under advanced. You can also change the size of the large program aware flag in Windows.
This is most likely memory related as njeneb mentioned. My guess, given the render times you're quoting, is that you're either rendering at very high resolution, or with extreme settings. If you can give us a brief overview of your rendering settings, including cache size and number of render threads, that would help. Njeneb's suggestion to lower cache size may be good if you've increased it, but if you're using the default it's probably not necessary.
- Oshyan
Hi TBH this is my first full render so I don't know much about what the settings should be so it's possible they might be more or less wrong or too high. :-[
Here is what I have for render settings in the attachments.
3DSFX
Ok so in this case mainly it's your render resolution, and second probably your GI settings (relative detail of 4 is quite high) paired with a main detail of 0.95. At that main detail level, I would either reduce the Relative Detail to say 2 (since it is "relative" detail, it will actually still be fairly high with your high primary detail), or you could reduce main detail to say 0.75, and still reduce GI relative detail to 2 or 3. That should help with memory issues.
At this point there are a few other bits of info that will paint a clearer picture of the memory situation here. First, are you on a 64 bit version of windows? If not, you'll be at a disadvantage, but you may still be able to enable the "/3gb" switch to give TG2 a bit of extra memory.
Also the makeup of your scene obviously makes a difference. Do you have a lot of large objects, populations, or large image maps (even textures on objects that are large)?
Finally, it's important to consider the atmosphere and cloud sample levels, as they contribute to both memory use and render time as well. 2 settings in particular that are often used erroneously and can contribute dramatically to both high render time and memory usage are the "Raytraced Shadows" options on the Quality tab of both cloud layers and the atmosphere shader. I recommend keeping those *unchecked* in most cases. Cloud samples can usually be set by adjusting the Quality slider and keeping it around 1 or 1.5. I seldom need to go above 2. Atmosphere samples will depend quite a lot on the lighting and perspective in your scene, but generally 32 is the highest you'll need to go unless you have heavy shadows going on.
Have you rendered this scene at lower resolution successfully? If so posting your earlier render would help give a better sense of the total scene construction.
- Oshyan
Wooowh! Ya I had all the atmosphere settings way to high seems like. My Atmosphere sampelings were set to 128 as well as the cloud quality. ::)
I'm running a 64bit machine but at this point I only have 4Gb of ram but monitoring the render it's only using less than 40%. I'm going to try it again and see if I get the ray tracing error.
I guess I was going for as much realisim as possible but I was probably past the point of diminishing returns I'm guessing with settings that high.
3DSFX
Yes, I would agree that the increased detail probably wouldn't be making a huge difference at that point. Detail and quality in TG2 are not quite as simple as "turn everything up for best results". But fortunately that also means you have a lot of control and ability to tune quality vs. render time, etc.
- Oshyan
Well a small test render is almost complete with no ray-tracing errors. :D
re-reading your post, I have no extra objects or texture maps. I haven't figured out how to use them yet. I did bring in a palm tree from Xfrog sample pack but it just showed up as a bounding box so I have to find some info about how to do that. The usual steep learning curve! I'm useto doing motion graphics and just a bit of 3DS max so this is fairly unfamiliar to me except for some of the similarities between this and 3DS max.
I am glad to see all 4 croes pegged at %100 though with this program. Some of the high end software I use dosen't take advantage of multiple cores like it should. I need a blade server rack. LOL
Thanks,
3D
The 3D preview will only show objects as a bounding box for now, but it will show up properly when you actually render. Just use the bounding box to position the object.
- Oshyan
OH! ::)
So that's normal then. Ok!! LOL
Since I changed the >3GB large program address flag on my PC, I have not had RAM memory problems very often. I increased the swap file size to 8 GB. This has become where I get the most memory size errors now.
Try 48 for the atmosphere samples. The lowest cloud layer needs the highest detail and the slider at 1. Higher clouds can use different acceleration cache settings and still look great.