Mental Ray renders black screen

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

I'm pretty new to 3ds, using 2014, and trying to render a still image for publication. Aside from all of the memory errors I am getting, when I try to render the scene I just get a black screen. I think it has something to do with my lighting system. It's a daylight assembly, but I'm not sure how to manipulate it so that my scene shows up. Let me know if you need any other files or information, let me know.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

-Jackie

[darawork]

Hi,

I rendered your scene in 3ds max design 2015 and it rendered ok for me.

The only thing is, your particles were pretty big (50cm) so I dropped them down to .1cm.

I changed the Envionment and effects 'Exposure control' from 'Photographic Exposure' to 'Exposure value', and set that to 13.

I also changed the Daylight system from 'Date, Time and Location' to 'Manual' and rotated the sun to be behind the camera.

Those changes didn't need to be made for the scene to render initially though, there was no black screen here for me... just massive black particles.

Can you list your system specs? I suspect your problem lies there instead.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your prompt reply,

I could defenitely see it being my system, since my Windows OS is a virtual machine on a mac. I also sent it to a cloud renderer and it came out black there too. Anyway, here is the system info for the virtual machine. 

Processor: Intel Core i5-3427U CPU @ 1.80GHz 2.29GHz

Installed Memory (RAM): 1.00 GB

System Type: 64-bit Operating System (Wnidows 7 Ultimate)

I will try installing 3ds Max on a work computer with more memory and processing power and see what happens.

-Jackie

[Steve_Curley]

Parallels? Theoretically supported, but most people use bootcamp. Less convenient perhaps, but works much better.
Only 1GB RAM? You do realise the minimum requirement is 4GB with 8GB recommended?
You also missed out the most important system component - your graphics card.

[Anonymous]

I'm not gonna get into the whole Windows vs Mac battle...I'll probably switch the bootcamp at some point, but for now Parallels serves most of my needs. I would allocate more memory to the virtual machine, but I only have 4GB of memory to start with and it's all but full.

My video card:

Intel HD Graphics 4000:

  Chipset Model:    Intel HD Graphics 4000
  Type:    GPU
  Bus:    Built-In
  VRAM (Dynamic, Max):    1024 MB
  Vendor:    Intel (0x8086)

We have a computer at work that we do physics calculations/simulations and other more intense work on, so it looks like I'll be using that for future endeavors with Max.

-Jackie

[Steve_Curley · Accepted solution]

This is not a mac/win battle at all. Most Mac users run Max under bootcamp - search around here and you'll find that's the case.

HD4000 is unsupported and in most cases won't work properly with Max. Only 2 onboard chipsets are supported (HDP4000 and HDP4600).
Max System Requirements. Basically you're trying to run Max on a totally unsuitable system so it's not too surprising you're having problems.

[Anonymous]

Lol, I guess that's why you check hardware recommendations first...thanks guys.