Desperate for help

CARLILE_ARCHITECTS · 16 Sept 2014, 17:38

Hi All. First time post here. We are desperate for help with an approaching deadline.

We have developed a model in Sketchup. It was about 50 MB, due to some components that were inserted and later removed. We were able to get that down to just over 30 MB using Thomthom's cleaning plug-in.

Yesterday, chaos suggested that we try to render as a vrimg to our hard drive as sketchup kept crashing and was giving and the crash report was indicating that we were out of memory.

We are attempting to render this model with a early 2014 iMac core5 which is a 64 bit operating system with 8 GB ram. This morning, we were able to get a single scene to render to an output file as a .png, .emr, and .vrimg

We were rendering at preset quality level 4 (high) and a decent resolution. Now... even trying to render at test quality at the lowest resolution is again causing crashes.

We have restarted the system, reloaded the model. Nothing. It always crashes.

I really need some help here. Anybody lend a hand?

CARLILE_ARCHITECTS · 16 Sept 2014, 17:57

Here is the crash report from just now:

Process: SketchUp [1189]
Path: /Applications/SketchUp 2014/SketchUp.app/Contents/MacOS/SketchUp
Identifier: com.sketchup.SketchUp.2014
Version: 14.1 (14.1.1283)
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [1003]
Responsible: SketchUp [1189]
User ID: 502

Date/Time: 2014-09-16 13:02:35.471 -0500
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.9.4 (13E28)
Report Version: 11
Anonymous UUID: 229BD844-823C-B6BC-E15C-DE44F68687AF

Crashed Thread: 20

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

CARLILE_ARCHITECTS · 16 Sept 2014, 18:08

Andybot... I got your PM.

This forum won't let me respond. I am too new and not authorized to use Private Messages.

I will share the model file here.

If you could take a look and let me know any ideas why we are having such a hard time rendering the scenes, I would really appreciate the help.

Jacob Carlile

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7rWF-rGd2tpMnFlVkFpbmhhSk0/edit?usp=sharing

Rich O Brien · 16 Sept 2014, 18:21

You should be able to avail of PMs now

CARLILE_ARCHITECTS · 16 Sept 2014, 18:22

@rich o brien said:

You should be able to avail of PMs now

Yes, it appears that I can send them, but when I do it looks like it sends but then just sits in the outbox.

andybot · 16 Sept 2014, 18:28

until I had a chance to check my inbox Will look at it forthwith!

CARLILE_ARCHITECTS · 16 Sept 2014, 18:28

@andybot said:

until I had a chance to check my inbox Will look at it forthwith!

Oh! My bad. I thought it hadn't sent, not that you didn't check it.

My mistake.

CARLILE_ARCHITECTS · 16 Sept 2014, 18:44

Everytime I try to render, right after it builds the light cache it tries to build the bitmap files and crashes.

So frustrating.

Box · 16 Sept 2014, 18:46

I don't know anything about Vray specifically, but at a guess I would say that reversed faces could be causing your problem.
Many renderers have problems with back faces and your model is mostly inside out.

CARLILE_ARCHITECTS · 16 Sept 2014, 18:53

@box said:

I don't know anything about Vray specifically, but at a guess I would say that reversed faces could be causing your problem.
Many renderers have problems with back faces and your model is mostly inside out.

Hmm.. Thanks for the suggestion.

Not sure I know what you mean though. We close the face and then apply a material to the outboard side.

Is that not the right way of doing it?

Box · 16 Sept 2014, 19:12

SU uses back and front faces so it can understand what is happening. In the style you are using the front face is white and the back face is grey.
Look at your model in Monochrome mode and you will see which faces are reversed. It may not be the cause of your problem, but it is something you should address, if not this model then in the future.

CARLILE_ARCHITECTS · 16 Sept 2014, 19:23

That worked.

Thanks so much.

One of my interns must have inadvertently enabled displacement.

Thanks so much.

andybot · 16 Sept 2014, 19:24

turn off displacement in your grass and try rendering.

Edit: to add in grass, there are two options. You can photoshop it in, like this tutorial:
http://charlottesvillearchitecturalrendering.com/?p=127

or else you can try a grass proxy object for some of the foreground stuff. I'm sure Matt Valero has a tutorial somewhere

andybot · 16 Sept 2014, 19:26

@carlile_architects said:

That worked.

Thanks so much.

One of my interns must have inadvertently enabled displacement.

Thanks so much.

Ah, those pesky interns

yeah lots of displacement in the foreground kills vray.

CARLILE_ARCHITECTS · 17 Sept 2014, 14:31

Last night, I was up late rendering multiple scenes that are close into the building. We are pretty happy with how they are turning out.

When we are rendering the entire site (a village park) because we are also conceptualizing master planning, we are back to crashing again.

I am almost 100% certain that its a size issue as the entire park requires that we can't isolate specific areas, and thus the entire model is visible.

Any ideas on how to get this thing to render full park views?

solo · 17 Sept 2014, 14:58

I tested this model with another render app and it renders with all layers on, sure the model is very heavy and the vegetation should be done with proxy's to keep sizes more manageable.
If you need help rendering this just let me know, I am NOT using Vray however.

CARLILE_ARCHITECTS · 17 Sept 2014, 15:02

@solo said:

I tested this model with another render app and it renders with all layers on, sure the model is very heavy and the vegetation should be done with proxy's to keep sizes more manageable.
If you need help rendering this just let me know, I am NOT using Vray however.

Hi Solo.

Can you tell me which renderer you are using?

To be honest, I am surprised that Vray is crashing with a model that is now under 28MB. We are rendering on a 64 bit iMac with 8GB memory.

Maybe I am doing something wrong?

CARLILE_ARCHITECTS · 17 Sept 2014, 15:05

I will also look at converting the vegetation to proxy's.

I have no idea what that means though. Need to do some research.

EDIT: I see. Proxies minimize file size to keep it more manageable while modeling, but the rendering would still require the Hi-poly components.

I get what you are saying, but that apparently isn't going to help my current problem which is render crashing?

solo · 17 Sept 2014, 15:10

I use Thea render

andybot · 17 Sept 2014, 15:38

@carlile_architects said:

I will also look at converting the vegetation to proxy's.

I have no idea what that means though. Need to do some research.

EDIT: I see. Proxies minimize file size to keep it more manageable while modeling, but the rendering would still require the Hi-poly components.

I get what you are saying, but that apparently isn't going to help my current problem which is render crashing?

It should though - the proxy conversion replaces your heavy components with a lighter-weight preview "mesh" which you can then duplicate around your model as you need. For sure the trees and shrubbery should be converted to components. I'm wondering if things like the building trusses could be converted as well. The more you rely on proxies, the quicker your processing time to get the vray render started.

Here's an example of a site rendering I did where all the vegetation was done using proxy components: http://charlottesvillearchitecturalrendering.com/?p=556