low memory?

[jg3d]

Hi,

 

I have been a character animator up until a couple of months ago, so I'm pretty new to environment modelling. I built a neighborhood in 3d max that has 1.5 million poly's in it, and I can't render some of the shots. (particularly the shots with reflecting and refracting water, and lots of trees and plants in them.)

 

With the shots that I've already rendered, I used 3 or 4 lights. (3 lights are fill lights, and the 4th is the key light with Area Shadows). So I want to keep the lighting in the rest of the animation consistent with those, but I can't seem to render one more frame. I keep getting error messages saying "there is not enough memory for raytracer to build it's acceleration data"

 

So, I disabled the raytracer in the rendering options, and tried again. after I click render, it tries to render for a second, then I get an error message saying that 3dmax is shutting down due to low memory.

 

I've tried hiding the objects that aren't in the shot...same problem

 

I'm working with a 2.6 Ghz dual opteron, with 4 gigs ram

 

Is my scene just way too big, or do I need to load up on some ram?

 

help please.

[manta]

I feel your pain, had the same problems, the only fix I've been able to find was using Brazil, it has 3 accelorators for doing large scenes, a previously unrenderable scene with three other renderers, (scanline,MR and vray free)

I was able to render sucessfully with brazil, however if thats not an option, try enabling the 3GIG switch in your boot .ini, it will allow you to use 3 gigs instead of two, but if three gigs is still not enough, then it won't do you much good, I've been waiting very impatiently for 64bit Max, which will make these errors a thing of the past, but its going to be a while longer...

[STRAT]

a 1.5 million poly scene with trees, plants, reflections/refractions and area shads sounds like one MASSIVE model to render. failure to render, even with 4 gig of ram, doesnt suprize me.

 

if the scene must be that big, the optomisation is most definately ur friend

[tcorbett]

a 1.5 million poly scene with trees, plants, reflections/refractions and area shads sounds like one MASSIVE model to render. failure to render, even with 4 gig of ram, doesnt suprize me.

 

Recently I've been successfully rendering a 2.7 million scene on a P4 3.2Ghz with 2GB of RAM. Sun & Skylight with high quality area shadows. Radiosity crashes it (low memory abort), and I dare not try MR, but the scanline has been stable for me.