Rendering crashes.....is it only me?

[PeterJ]

I find that sometimes when rendering Revit will apparently crash and yet continue to run in the background - the sympotms, or clues, are that if you reopen Revit and go to reopen the file you were working on it will tell you that it is in use by another user, also you can still find Revit in the Task Manager Processes list.

On ocaission it seems to come back if you wait out the process, but this can be time consuming.

Anyone no why or what to do about this?

Please help.



PS XP Pro, latest Revit Build, Athlon 1.1 Ghz and 1 gig of ram

[Steve_Stafford]

I can expect crash when doing a final render after doing a number of render starts and cancelling first. So, I've taken to doing the tweaking and restarting to "restore" my PC's memory. This method, though a bit tedious, has been free of crashes since.

[sbrown]

Revit is not really crashed, it is just taking up 100% of your system resources in its rendering calcs that lets say you minimize or shift over to check your email, you probably won't get revit to come back up for many minutes or possibly until its done the rendering.

When you render do the following.

1. save your file right before you click render
2. close revit and maybe even shutdown and restart your machine.
3. check your image size anything and set it appropriately for your machines power. for example we have 2.4gig Xeons with 2 gig of ram they can handle up to about a image size of 6000x6000 pixels maybe more but it won't be fun. our 2gig p4 machines with 1 gig of ram I wouldn't go over about 4000x4000 max

I still haven't figured out why rendering with accurender inside of revit is so darn painful. I used accurender for years on autocad r14 with a 500mhz pentium with 256mb ram and could render much larger images than inside revit with 4-5times that machine. Something is wacked in the code is all I can imagine.

I hope more previous accurender users ask revit for improvement in this area, I have but i'm only one. I think it has something to do with revit trying to render inside the program where accurender would "shell out" of autocad. not sure.

[MartyC]

Hi there,

No PeterJ, its not only you having issues with rendering crashes/freezes.

I have raised this issue with my supplier, who I understand has sought an answer from Autodesk. Answer was: 'known issue'.

My problem that I have had to get used to, is when selecting and/or modifying materials I will have a total freeze when using the accurender dialogue. I have found I can select 3 or 4 materials maximum then when exiting the dialogue with either the 'apply' or 'ok' buttons the whole program freezes requiring a close, report to microsoft etc. then reopen Revit and active file, not from the menu, but from the project file where it is stored. I have learnt to save before any accurender work, and constantly with each material change or selection in anticipation of a guarateed crash.

I do not have any problem when rendering if I restart computer before rendering and quite readily produce a hi res render in a reasonable time. If I dont restart, Revit will often stop responding and does not complete the render process.

I must say that there has been a lot of frustration and choice expletives as a result of this flaw, before accepting the work-around. I have been anticipating some improvement, as I have figured this would be fixed in an upcoming release, but I have been surprised that there is little comment on this issue, and therefore maybe its my machine setup.

I had read in an Accurender newsgroup some time ago a brief comment that this problem used to occur in the past on computers using IE5 and the suggestion was to dump IE and use Netscape. This is not appropriate for me, and I expected XP and IE6 could be different. This thread eventually went nowhere.

If anyone has any further info/comment/fixes, I would certainly appreciate it.

System: P4 2.26Ghz, 1 gig ram, Intel MB, 128mb geforce4, XP pro

Cheers M

[Steve_Stafford]

I too have crashes with the material editor.

[Allen Lacy]

Same here with material editor. Usually happens when I am creating a new material from an exisiting one, and try to delete a tile procedure or something like that.

I also have had Revit "hang" when I try to cancel a rendering.