bionatics & memory

[Lincoln Brown]

i've been pulling my hair out for the past 24 hours trying to get an animation rendering. bionatics trees are the culprit, and this being a winter scene, there's nothing else i can use.

 

the model has about 40 trees, all set to Hybrid mode. not a lot faces! and yet these trees manage to eat up 1GB of memory just sitting there, not even rendering. I am constantly getting out of memory errors (i have 4gb with /3gb switch set). The rest of the model is not all that big, i've worked with far larger w/o problems. my system has plenty of juice, dual xeon & 4gb. using max8.

 

when i did manage to get the model out to backburner to render some frames there were no memory issues (and some of my nodes only have 1GB). however, the trees rendered black, so I'm trying to assess why and now can't even get the tree file to open.

 

any ideas what could be causing this??? does anyone have advice for how to efficiently work with bionatics trees?

[dinhtuan]

Which renderer do you use to render? Do you need to animate the trees? If the trees are not animate you can convert to editablemesh or poly. And if you use vrayrenderer you can convert all the trees to Vray Proxy.

BR

[Lincoln Brown]

i'm using the scanline, and not animating them. i'd been trying with vray but since i'm new to vray animation, gave up because that just compounded my problems. rendering, once i can get there, is actually working ok.

 

working with the file is the big problem. i tried converting one tree to an editable mesh but the file got hung up (this is a max file with only the trees) so no luck there.

 

i am managing to get the renders going, so long as i xref the trees at the very last second (they are excluded from radiosity anyway). saving/loading the 16mb file takes forever, edits occasionally crash it.

 

arghhhh! i'm missing halloween parties over this...

 

it seems as though i'll get the project done, but i'd like to use bionatics for future snowy projects without wasting away the weekend!