CompuServe Thread

Help! I am in the middle of the largest project I have ever attempted, and 3DS keeps locking up after about 2 to 3 rendered frames! Using Zeos Pantera 90, with 24 Mbyte of RAM, Par (latest version), par drive 1 Gbyte, and a SCCSI 1 Gbyte. The file is an 900 frame animation….290,000 faces, Phong shading, 300 some objects. What appears to be happening, is that when I swap to disk, and the swap size approaches approx 70 Mbyte….the rendering process will hang. When I use phong shading it happens within 2 to 3 frames, when I use flat, I can get anywhere from 9 to 16 frames before the magic number. I cannot confirm tho on all lockups that it happened when the swap hit 70 Mbyte. I did have local shading variables for the two lights I was using….Map size 1000, Map bias 1, and Map sample range at 5. I changed these to GLOBAL and used the defaults of 500, 1 and 2 respectively, it still hung at about 70 Mbyte swap size. What is curious is the nature of the "Hang". sometimes it was a complete freeze and forced reboot, sometimes I could hit the ESC key and it would exit out normally. ( I would wait as long as 30 min before hitting ESC key when the render bar ceased to move….it was not thinking and I jumped the gun). Not to be misleading, it would not always hang during the render progress bar sequence….sometimes it would hang during "optimizing". This is a 900 frame animation @ 30 fps for a 30 sec spot…. I need help, the customer is waiting!!!! Im at my wits end!!!!! Yes I have tried the proverbial "Clean Boot", no luck….tonight for do do and giggles I am going to set the -swapdisk parameter in the cfig386.exe file to something other than the root….other than that, I am using cfig386 defaults. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated <G> P.S. I have 500 Mbyte of free disk space on my swapdrive, and I have run defrag, and optimize. Scan disk reported no problems…. Mason