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Maya crashes when trying to render displacement

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi, I’m at a lost as to why Maya is crashing every time I attempt a render. I followed Scott Spencer’s mental ray tutorial religiously (http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=25540) And the system crashes without fail. I’m admittedly not very familiar with MEL scripting, but I added this script thinking it might help (http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=56061&highlight=rendering+displacement+maya) and now instead of crashing, maya cancels the render and displays this error message:

“// Error: Fatal (mental ray) : mental ray encountered a fatal error. The system may have become unstable. Please save the scene and exit Maya.”

Also, when I use a TIFF file type for my displacement map, I get this error in the output window.

TIFFReadDirectory: Warning, D:/3d stuff/blizzard concept/worm_displace.tif: unknown field with tag 37724 (0x935c) encountered.

But when I switch to a different image type, it doesnt seem to help. Running a quad-core and 4g of RAM, so I don’t think thats a problem. When I switch over to maya software rendering it doesnt seem to encounter any errors, so I’m assuming that this problem is something wrong with my mental ray settings. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

#2

i’m in a very similar situation. Every time i try to render with displacement at the n subdivision level required to get the detail i need, mental ray runs out of memory and gives me that same warning that the system may have become unstable. i have 9 gigs of ram in my machine (of course mental ray refuses to use more than 1.something gig of it, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to increase that number…)
i’m really at a loss of what to do.
i’ll be watching here to see if anyone knows what’s going on and how to proceed…

#3

hmm. well, an update. I think the problem may have been because of a corruption in the displacement map image itself. I went into Zbrush and re-exported a new one, and it seems to be working better. I’m still not getting as much detail out of the map as I would like, but i disgress…

Now when I use Scott Spencer’s script and turn on the Mi Export CC Mesh, while it does fix my seams, it seems to destroy the texture map. I’m a bit confused as to why its doing that…can anyone help?

Sorry, I’m a bit new to using Zbrush. ^^;