Mental ray rendering

Artist_in_a_box

Hey guys. I am rendering some work with mental ray and recieving the error message 'no photons stored after...'. I have reduced my lights down to 1 photon emitted from 1 omni light as well as encased the scene in a sphere and double checked all my materials to make sure they are gi compatible.

The scene I am working on is very big with over 2000 chunks being driven by massfx in a big explosion with other forces at work. I am still getting the error message after double checking all the above. Can anyone think of a reason why I am still getting this message? I have checked and double checked everything I can find now and am out of ideas. I have just resorted to rendering in scanline for now.

I did find something in the mental ray documentation (for maya however) that stated that sometimes a scene can have areas of shadow where the light cannot reach and that can cause this error. Never had this problem before. The only reason why I am considering this is that at first when the mesh is whole it renders no bother but as soon as the mesh explodes all hell breaks loose and the error message is displayed and the lights stop working.

Cheers

Artist_in_a_box

Never mind, sorted it. A programmer friend explained how the gi was calculated and the gist of it is : It turns out that some of my 'chunks' where firing out beyond the range of my photon generator. I may be able to fix this via the render options I imagine but the easier fix is for me to put some deflectors in behind the scene walls to catch any pieces before they shoot off out of range. We tested this out and it worked.