Hi I am new to 3dsmax and working on a private project which just about has everything possible in it - several large buildings, banks of roads and grass, trees, the sea, several complex boat exhibits outside, lots of people, lots of cars, complex tubular roof structures, etc etc. Suffice it to say the size of the file to date is 160Mb and poly count is over 3 million and I have yet to apply lighting and mapping - so its a big scene I would think even for a decent Arch Vis render. I am mainly using it to learn with but obviously I do want to render some nice views as well at the end of the day.
At the moment I have 32bit Max, 3Gb Ram and only WinXP Home so Max is crashing when I try to render past 600x480 size due to memory. Also, considering I dont have much of an idea about rendering settings yet, I am uncertain whether these are set right or are far too high - at the moment I am trying to render with settings kept as Max comes ie default.
Now what I would like to know is:
Firstly is this a reasonable size for a complex Arch Vis project at all or is it well over the top. Just out of interest what are reasonable Arch Vis file sizes usually? I know its probably a matter of 'how long is a piece of string' but getting an idea of typical maximum file sizes to aim for would be useful to know for the future.
Secondly I want to upgrade to 64 bit Max, Windows 7 64 bit, and get more RAM to cope with rendering such scenes. What RAM should I get? Would 8MB be sufficient do you think to enable me to render large scenes reasonably well? The official Autodesk system requirements say 8Mb is ok but is it very suitable in practice for large scenes?
Thank you for any comments.