3DS Max 9 - Error Message in Metal Ray

[spittle]

Any idea what this mesage means.

It's only in one particular Max file. The most up to date one unfortunately!

[sandmanninja]

From google:

Someone with ALMOST the same error:

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/28241-...rendering.html

Hello everyone again!

I've had an error message a couple of times now when trying to render scenes. The message is:

"mental ray has encountered a fatal error and the application will now shutdown. The error is:

DB 0.4 fatal 041008: attempt to access null DB tag"

Any ideas anyone?

Antony

Someone with a sorta similar error:


Try enabling the 3-gig switch:
http://discussion.autodesk.com/threa...hreadID=485392

Here is how I have it in my XP system (credit goes to alexander
bicalho):

Start > Config > Control Panel > System

Go to the Advanced Tab

Click "Settings" in Startup and Recovery

Click "Edit" to edit the options file manually

(It should look similar to this one - each computer is unique):

[boot loader]

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WIN DOWS

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Micros oft Windows XP Professional"
/fastdetect

Create a copy of the last line, add information between quoted and add
the

switch to the first line:

[boot loader]

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WIN DOWS

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Micros oft Windows XP Professional"
/fastdetect

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS= "Microsoft Windows XP Professional
3GB" /fastdetect

3GB

Change the timeout to something different than 0 if yours is 0 so you
have time to choice among

options at boot time.

Save the file and reboot. Choose the 3GB option when rebooting.

and

http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/.../t-185820.html

zalooa
04-22-2005, 09:04 AM
Guys I have some VERY GOOD NEWS
While fiddling with the mental ray settings as i was doing for a long time. The answer to our problems...well mine at least was right in fron of me. WHen You hit F10 and the rendering dialog comes up, THere are tabs at the top. I clicked Processing and saw the CONSERVE MEMORY BUTTON...this did not help but right above it and to the righ is the MEMORY LIMIT. IT WAS set to 1500 MB my scene needed more than that so i made it 3000 MB and it RENDERED. THE SAME SCENE that would not render FINALLY renderred. I think this is the problem because I am happy with the results. It would explain why the memory runs out if you tell the program to use only a fraction of it. Let me know if this helps guys
PEACE

and

And a link for the 3GB : http://www.eyeonline.com/Web/EyeonWe...echFAQ.aspx#15


and

Argh, I had this problem too. Strangely, it disappeared when I deleted my light source
(mr omni) and replaced it with a spot.
I really don't know if the mr omni was the true source of the problem, and I might experiment to find out (it will take a bit of time). I was just pleased that the crashing stopped.

and

You guys may not believe this but I found a fix for the problems we have been having. My school would render the scene only with 1 gig ram but mine with 2 gigs would not. Your laptop would but your workstation would not. What is the deference? Let me guess, you laptop does not have a graphics card and has to run software texturing? No open GL or direct X9. My computers at school default at software and I forgot to change the setting. I got hope, Set the graphics mode to software, the scene that crashed every time last night now renders fine and fast. Might just be dumb luck for me and not the problem but who knows.

and

Ok, had the problem in our art department myself. Imho we are talking about at LEAST 2 problems here:
1st people who simply dont have enough memory for their scenes or too large scenes
2nd people who have plenty of memory and still cant render especially high res images


we are of the second category here. Mental ray usually fails with an error message about not beeing able to create a temp file caled "fb000.something" because it does not have enough memory. This alone is strange because creating a file handle needs very little memory and mental ray tells us that it used only about halve of our system memory. Our guess here is that this is a so called "memory mapped file", a file that is mirrored in the main memory. So what actually happens is that mental ray tries to allocate a big chunk of memory in one go and fails. The bigger your screen resolution is the bigger is the chunk of memory mental ray needs, in our case about 100MB and thats the problem. Every application in 32Bit Windows gets max 2 or 3 GB of memory. mental ray is not a separate application but runs within max and uses the memory Max got assigned. Max itself is a memory hog and uses some 100 MB itself. Before you render max has to load a scene, create a internal representation and display it on screen. So it does already do a lot of memory operations which fragment the memory. Mental ray has to live with that fragmented memory and although everything works well as long as it allocates small chunks of memory at a time, it might fail when it tries to allocate a 100MB big chunk simply because the memory is already too fragmented.


Solution? The best solution might be to render it standalone so mental ray gets a fresh and clean memory space.
If you insist rendering from within max, start rendering directly after you start max, switch to software Z Buffer (Opengl seems to fragment memory more, thanks RickStefani, worked for me), try the the 3GB swith so the fragmentation is slower, and if tall this does fail, think about how else you can reduce the memory usage of max itself. One of our artists had to disable the splitting of his viewport and display everything as box. After a Max restart his scene rendered. Sounds like voodoo, doesnt it?

Let us know how you solve it.

Thanks

__________________
-SandmanNinja
Current Tutorial: AutoCAD 2006 tutorials
Current Book: 3ds Max 2009 Architectural Visualization - Intermediate to Advanced

[spittle]

The solution was, try all of the above, drink a few glasses of milk, and then revert back to an older saved version and redo it...

[sectish]

Originally Posted by spittle

The solution was, try all of the above, drink a few glasses of milk, and then revert back to an older saved version and redo it...

hi in this site there is a video tutorial.is it free or i need to give money to download the files.becoz i am not able to download the file.please help me.

[spittle]

I don't think this issue was to do with memory, or lack of memory as I'm successfuly rendering my scene now which is further on than the one I had the error message with.

I'm wondering if the file was corrupted? Although it would still render with Material Override on.

[sandmanninja]

Did you try that first link in my post?

It has almost the same error as your:
"mental ray has encountered a fatal error and the application will now shutdown. The error is:
DB 0.4 fatal 041008: attempt to access null DB tag"

The others were MEM, this one was DB - like yours.

[spittle]

Originally Posted by sandmanninja

Did you try that first link in my post?

It has almost the same error as your:
"mental ray has encountered a fatal error and the application will now shutdown. The error is:
DB 0.4 fatal 041008: attempt to access null DB tag"

The others were MEM, this one was DB - like yours.

Ah i see. I didn't see the last post. i stopped at the sponsor. Will give it a go later, I think I have Backburner. I'd still be suprised if it was down to memory as my scene has grown a fair bit since the problem as far as adding more complex textures etc and I'm now rendering on higher settings as well.