Hey guys, I have a really annoying problem…
Don’t know why, since 4 days ago everything was perfect, but now, when I try to use rendermap to bake an albedo, ambient occlusion or “entire surface” map ( I tryied every resolution possible, even 64x64 ) Rendermap keep crashing...I mean that I have the “usual” error that say that “mental ray has been disabled because of an error”....

Can someone explain me why?

I have both FG+GI enabled for bake the entire surface, I tried to disable everything and just bake the procedural material but nothing....same thing for the ambient occlusion, keep crashing…

Help me :(

I’ve been getting this error a LOT with version 7+.
When loading the same models into v6.5, it seems to stutter in some places but manages to chug through it in the end.

Originally, I found that giving mentalray plenty of ‘room’ to bake the map would do the trick (so no collapsed projections on the 1:1 space, and no islands that were considered too tiny - this could also be fixed by rendering with a much larger resolution). Sometimes having projections that shared the same UV space would also do this. For a while this seemed to work fine (generating more than 100 AO maps alone for the project I was working on). Unfortunately, as soon as I moved onto another project, it started crashing again even though I used all the same settings as before. So I too would appreciate anyone’s insight into the matter.

(At least with AO maps, I find sometimes you can avoid a crash by baking with only ‘front facing triangles’ checked, baking again with only ‘back facing triangles’ checked, and then blending the two in photoshop)

For practical reason I’m just using UniqueUv for baking the AO...I’m trying everything but nothing, it keep crashing everytime and it is veeeeery annoying…
I didn’t try the front/back option, even because it takes too long to do that and I just need something ready to put into photoshop to add to my baked map ( albedo ) :(

Depending on the shape of the object, UniqueUV might be packing the faces too tightly or two small. I have been able to isolate such islands as the trouble-makers in the past, and have found that the way something is modeled and unwrapped often makes a big difference in determining if XSI/MR decides to crash or not.

The front/back option only adds a minute or two to the workflow (just the time it takes to bake an extra map, and even then it might be faster as it would skip faces), and it certainly gets the work done much faster than messing around with a crashing Mental Ray for hours or days on end. It’s not the best solution (if it even is one), but if you’re on a production deadline or your employer insists on going around roadblocks instead of wasting time trying to break through them, it can be a useful trick around this annoyance.

Otherwise, you could try giving xNormal a spin. It’s a free program, and works well for baking maps from one mesh to another.

[quote=Cryrid;19297]Depending on the shape of the object, UniqueUV might be packing the faces too tightly or two small. I have been able to isolate such islands as the trouble-makers in the past, and have found that the way something is modeled and unwrapped often makes a big difference in determining if XSI/MR decides to crash or not.

The front/back option only adds a minute or two to the workflow (just the time it takes to bake an extra map, and even then it might be faster as it would skip faces), and it certainly gets the work done much faster than messing around with a crashing Mental Ray for hours or days on end. It’s not the best solution (if it even is one), but if you’re on a production deadline or your employer insists on going around roadblocks instead of wasting time trying to break through them, it can be a useful trick around this annoyance.

Otherwise, you could try giving xNormal a spin. It’s a free program, and works well for baking maps from one mesh to another.

That could be a problem too ( uniqueuv I mean ), but not every object in my scene is done with this technique...for mapping purpouse I had to use Roadkill to have a nice unwrap ( god, this plugin works perfectly ), but when I have really complicated mesh I usually use uniqueuv...whatever, with proper uv or without it keep crashing...the strange thing is that is not happening when I try to bake “surface color and illumination”...I probably reinstall the previous version ( currently I’m using 7.01 ), but the main problem is that now everything is in XSI7!
Well, even trying with the front/back option crash...now I’m dowloading xNormal and see what can I do...thanks fr the tip!!