How to Render a scene with huge no. of lights

[moonrathna]

Dear all,

 

I am looking for the answer to render a scene with more number of lights and my system config is with 4GB RAM and I also increased paging file size of my PC and I changed the driver to OPENGL what else to do to render my scene and to avoid the error pop up of "run out of memory"

 

Using 3ds Max 9

My OS is Win XP

3GB switch is ON -

Mine is 32 bit OS

scene is having more than 700 lights-exterior scene.

 

please give me your suggestion

Edited March 12, 2009 by moonrathna

[WAcky]

More info!

 

What Software are you using? What renderer are you using? What operating system are you using? Is it 64 bit? If not, have you enabled the /3gb switch? What size is your render?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[moonrathna]

Using 3ds Max 9

My OS is Win XP

3GB switch is ON -

Mine is 32 bit OS

scene is having more than 700 lights-exterior scene.

 

please give me your suggestion.

[WAcky]

What renderer are you using? Scanline, MR or Vray?

 

Can you give us a screen grab or possibly even a low res render?

 

Reason I'm asking is you may be able to fake some lights in post or use a different lighting method.

 

700 lights...wow...

[moonrathna]

Using scanline renderer, I attached the pictures rendered with reduced number of luminaire

[ATTACH]31639[/ATTACH]

 

[ATTACH]31640[/ATTACH]

[AFK_Matrix]

How far away are you going to be viewing this? Are you going to animate it? Just thinking you could get away with maybe making the edges of those shapes self iluminate and use a texture to fake the indiviual light points?

 

Just an idea and others will have a much better idea than me how to do this I am sure.

[gordo3di]

When I ran into mem problems from lights I turned on the attenuation and falloff for the light and set it to something reasonable.

 

But I agree with the others... We need more info.

 

Do you have a huge number of textured objects? Are you using Mental ray or another advanced renderer? What is your final render output (very important)? Its not all just about the system you have...

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Don't use IES for the lights, and consider rendering each of those piers in a seperate pass, then comping them together in Photoshop.

[moonrathna]

Mr.Crazy Guy could you tell me how to create lights without ies and lighting profession, I need the realistic of the luminaire what iam using could any body tell me the way to create the fake effect like self illuminatation

[AJLynn]

Moved to 3DSMax forum.

 

That's a seriously complicated scene. Can you go to mental ray and make the lights using a glowing material with FG with detail enhancement? (If you don't know what that is, don't try it right now.)

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Mr.Crazy Guy could you tell me how to create lights without ies and lighting profession, I need the realistic of the luminaire what iam using could any body tell me the way to create the fake effect like self illuminatation

 

Just create a photometric target light and leave it on uniform spherical or spotlight depending on yours needs. IES files are nice for some things, but in the 3d world, you often need to make compromises in order to have a scene render efficiently. IES files tend to use a lot of RAM when calculating, so not using them will have obvious benefits.

 

Rather than using a fake self illumination, try setting Attenuation, using standard, or at least non IES lights. Don't use area shadows, and make sure your shadows are ray traced. If all that fails, then do some experiments with no shadows on the lights, while paying close attention to the Attenusation.

 

You say that you need the most photorealistic light you can get, but you are rendering with Scanline, which means you are going to have to use tricks to make the light appear as though it is bouncing around. rendering is more about conveying a message, the details, and making something look right than it is about having exact IES values.