Where is an appropriate place to post a possible bug question? Support or General?
I would pose the question first in the Support forum under the appropriate sub-category. Be sure to give as many specifics as possible about your system and setup and the specific steps one might take to duplicate the problem. There are many very experienced users who keep tabs on those categories who will know how best to deal with it if it is legitimate. There is a bug tracker in the SVN application that blender uses where users can inform the programming teams of such issues. Post it here (in the above category) first for verification, tho.
Excuse the tardy post, I’ve been trying to pinpoint precisely what was causing the crashes and I think I have it now, though it may not be anything new. I think it is a material with multiple nor mapped cloud textures, combined with a large number of GI photons.
With cache, and tune photons enabled I can render 7,000,000 photons but with tune photons disabled the limit is about 3-500,000(for a relatively simple scene, under 600kb file size).
I find I get a better quality result with a lower photon count and higher depth, essentially use less photons and bounce them around more. (I need to do more testing to see if large numbers of photons are better suited to rendering exterior scenes where more of the photons could become ‘lost’. )
Does anyone else have difficulty rendering multiple cloud textures mapped to nor with Yafray, using a high photon count with high quality settings ? Full G.I. with best quality, and anything over about 300,000 photons it crashes(usually during the first fake pass).
Is it a problem path tracing large numbers of photons, especially with multiple nor mapped textures; or have I simply exposed the limits of my system?
Can anyone confirm or deny(or explain !) what I’m on about?
Ubuntu 7.10, 1.86khz Intel dual core with 2gb ram and Intel 945 chipset. The standard Blender 2.45 and an optimised SSE2 build.
Its yafray that’s crashing, not blender. Suggest switching renderers. Try Indigo, Kerkythea, Sunflow, LuxRender or Radium. Each of these has a blender export script of varying degrees of quality. Each will match or exceed yafray’s quality/capability.
Thanks,
I liked the look of the Kerkythea output but these convergence renderers take a little longer to render(I want to animate), then I let it lapse when I couldn’t find a 64 bit blender integration, but I’ll check them out again.