Rendering large images - what's the script?

[Ricardo Eloy]

Hey, folks!

I searched all over for this and did not find any answers, so decided to ask myself...

Back in the r3 days, we used a script that would automatically divide a huge image in 4 or more equal pieces so Max could render it. Does anybody know if that script still exists for Max 7 (can't remember the name)? I know I can do it with region or blowup, but since I'm doing like a dozen images, I figured a script would help a lot.

[ktm07]

Why not just use the render strip feature in backburner? We are finding it to be quite useful on large images.

 

Tom

[manta]

BigRender

[Chad Warner]

The one I am thinking of was region net render.

[Ricardo Eloy]

Render strip in Backburner and BigRender... Right, guys! I'm gonna give those a try and let you know. Thank you for the fast replies!

[tanni]

In Brazil renderer - tiled rendering option may help you, or you can also try "on & increse" the Bitmap pager under preference setting- render.

[Ricardo Eloy]

Not using Brazil, here....

Anyway, I just started to render using backburner. First time I got an error after 50% of the pic was completed. Just trying again.

[abicalho]

Hi Rick,

 

I wrote a script for R3/R4 called Region Net Render. It's now built into MAX as Strip Scanlines in Backburner.

 

If you do not have enough RAM to render one strip, you may need to look into other alternatives. Maybe you need to just render the strips and assemble them manually.

 

Hope it helps,

[Ricardo Eloy]

Hi, Alex! Long time, huh?

That's the script I was talking about! It was available on your website, right? Anyway, the backburner option really worked. I mean, sometimes my 1 GB ram is not enough to assemble the image afterwards, but that's not really a problem. About rendering the strips manually, one thing I noticed is that if you try to render simply using region, it won't work. It seems max tries to load the whole scene and then render a part of it, which doesn't help much when it comes to saving memory.

Cheers, guys!

[abicalho]

It seems max tries to load the whole scene and then render a part of it, which doesn't help much when it comes to saving memory.

 

Hi Rick,

 

This will happen in any case. The entire scene needs to be in memory since you never know what will be reflected/refracted/occluded when rendering. Unless you have a REYES renderer (PRMan, etc), the entire scene will be in RAM.

 

What you save when rendering a strip is the bitmap memory. The bitmap uses 8 bytes per pixel (64bpp) so a 8Kx6K uses 384M of memory. If you do not use the Bitmap Pager, that has to live in a single block of RAM, which is a lot hard to do considering you're also loading your scene in memory.

 

Cheers,

[Ricardo Eloy]

Thanks for the info, Alex. Quando o cara sabe, sabe.

[arquiteck09]

http://www.forsolloza.com.ar/scripts/

 

Not sure if it works with new versions but you can try it, the best thing..... it is free.

[visions]

Thanks for this.

 

i had one general question...rendering to strips divides the images only horizontally and not vertically too. Why change the region net render that broke the image up in tiles vertically and horizontally?

 

Is there someone who can write this in english and provide a maxscript.

 

Thanks

Vivek

[abicalho]

The reason was simple: you lose less and mathematicaly there's no difference.

 

Why do you lose less? The bands have to be rendered with overlap due to antialiasing and effects. Rendering horizontal instead of both allows you to save the extra pixels you would have to render horizontaly.

 

Mathematicaly, what's different? Rendering an image of 3000x2000 in 25 600x400 tiles or in 25 3000x80 tiles? There's no difference.

 

Can you script it? Sure you can. You can script almost anything. The question is: "Is it worth it?"