As soon as I use Forest Pack with Civil View elements, Mental Ray Max crashes, what is the problem ?

Problem

As soon as I use Forest Pack together Civil View elements, Mental Ray Max crashes, what is the problem ?

Solution

In order to render the high-poly trees efficiently, Forest automatically sets up the following options in Mental Ray:

  • Renderer->Scanline off
  • Renderer->Raytrace acceleration->BSP2
  • Processing->Translator options->Use Placeholder Object on

But it seems the Civil View elements are not compatible with "Use Placeholder Object" mode, crashing Mental Ray.

So, if you don't use high-poly trees in your scene (for example using Forest billboards), you can turn off this option. If not, the only way is to exclude the Civil Elements from the render.