mskin Posted February 27, 2007 Share Posted February 27, 2007 question... am i nuts to think i can populate a scene with 300 or so 3d trees from onyx? i keep getting an "out of memory" error during the render.... mental ray and scanline. Is there a way to avoid this? i have 2gigs installed on my machine. are there any memory handling tactics or tricks that i don't know about (i assume yes). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mskin Posted February 27, 2007 Author Share Posted February 27, 2007 by the way, im looking for a little more than just yes from the first part of my question. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mskin Posted February 27, 2007 Author Share Posted February 27, 2007 i think i may have just discovered the answer? maybe not.... i selected large BSP instead of BSP.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tommy L Posted February 27, 2007 Share Posted February 27, 2007 Im thinking of buying onyx. I have the bamboo creator and its great, so i may get the rest. Let us know how you get on and post a render or 2.... Thanks, Tom. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mskin Posted February 27, 2007 Author Share Posted February 27, 2007 so far, i think they are pretty cool. Although my point wasn't that i was using onyx trees, but that i am using 3d trees... i have a scene populated with hundreds of 3d max trees... just for ha has to see how it would render. Not so well. It crashes pretty quickly. I have the same scene with about 1/2 the number of trees - im just not done putting them in yet - and it was crashing too. i changed BSP to large BSP and the file stopped crashing during the render. I tried the same trick on the file with max trees, but it still crashes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted February 27, 2007 Share Posted February 27, 2007 I never did find a way around that problem, so I switched to Vray, and used vray proxy meshes, it works very well, I can put 5,000 trees in, and it will render fine... But now that Max is 64bit, there shouldnt be a problem anymore... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Erstad Posted February 27, 2007 Share Posted February 27, 2007 courtesy of Neil Blevins... these actually make an impact - Thanks Neil! http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/cg_education.htm btw - love that avatar! Scott 1) Close all other applications. Seems obvious, but it's surprising how much RAM other small applications can take up. For example, iTunes seems to gobble up about 0.1 of a Gig of RAM, even though common sense seems to suggest it wouldn't take up too much memory. 2) Turn off the vfb and render to file. The "Virtual Frame Buffer" (vfb) which is now called the "Rendered Frame Window" takes up a lot of memory. So for the privilege of seeing a preview of your render, you're giving up potentially 200 to 300 meg of RAM, especially if you're rendering a 2k or 3k image. Go to the renderer options and uncheck the Rendered Frame Window Checkbox. If using a 3rd party renderer like Brazil, make sure you turn off it's frame buffer as well. Then set the renderer to save the result as a file in the Render Output section. This will save you tons of RAM. 3) Do a netrender. Even for still frames, even if you only have one computer, using backburner or a different netrenderer can save tons of RAM, because it doesn't need to fully load max to render your scene. So I usually set up my home computer as both the manager and the server, I go into max, I set off a netrender, making sure I have the "Initially Suspended" checkbox checked, then close max, then go into the Monitor and initialize the job (if you forget to submit the job uninitialized, your computer will try and load 2 copies of the scene, one in the netrender, and the copy of the scene that's already open in max, and that's a very bad thing). Check the manual for more info on using backburner, or whatever network renderer you choose. 4) Command Line Rendering. You can also use commandline rendering to render your file. Just look up Command Line Rendering in the help file. 5) Turn off bitmaps displayed in the viewport. This doesn't reduce memory for a netrender, but if you want to do an interactive render inside max, it's quite possible that a bunch of your memory is being eaten up displaying maps in your scene in the viewport (I was surprised the other day when I found out about half a GIG of RAM was being used up displaying a bunch of large maps in the viewport). Just go to the Views Menu and click on the "Deactivate All Maps" option. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted February 27, 2007 Share Posted February 27, 2007 Well I'll respond to my previous post, now that Max is 64bit it won't crash, now that's the good news, I decided to give it a try, rendering 750 high poly trees, the memory is up around 6.8Gigs and its been about 30 minutes now and only 3 buckets have completed, so its gonna be a while, my settings are default, so if I raise them to something like good quality...then it will probably make Maxwell look fast...so the good news is no more crashes, the bad news is waiting forever, vray proxies seems to be the best option still... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ipxstudios Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 Use v-ray proxies - then check this program out. http://www.gugila.com/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mskin Posted February 28, 2007 Author Share Posted February 28, 2007 this is a real bummer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 Yea, its one of the few reasons to use Vray. Or use 2D trees for the distant trees, 2.5 (IE X trees) for mid and only a few 3D trees for those right in front of the camera Onxy gives you an option to export low poly count trees, export out several resolution trees, very low for distant and more detailed as the trees get closer. Regardless if you use Vray or not 300+ 3D trees are going to take for ever to render. JHV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mskin Posted February 28, 2007 Author Share Posted February 28, 2007 what about proxies? everyone talks about the vray proxy - i find it incredible to believe that mental ray has nothing like this. multiple instancing? placeholders? something. along the same lines... i am under the impression that instancing and referenceing will be of no help in terms of my render - is that true? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 Yea, its one of the few reasons to use Vray. Regardless if you use Vray or not 300+ 3D trees are going to take for ever to render. JHV Ummm...it only took 1.34 minutes to render 750 high poly trees as proxies...with GI by the way...not exactly forever but I guess that's subjective, as I said before 5,000 trees doesn't take that much longer... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mskin Posted February 28, 2007 Author Share Posted February 28, 2007 Ummm...it only took 1.34 minutes to render 750 high poly trees as proxies...with GI by the way...not exactly forever but I guess that's subjective, as I said before 5,000 trees doesn't take that much longer... well who the hell has 1.34 minutes to spare?!?!?! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SunGlare Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 Yup, Vproxy give back the speed to computer. ...but: Trees are identical (you can rotate, load several different)Cant have interaction (wind, "face camera" for bitmaps: totally no-go for speedtree)You dont know where is it really, until you see render(wireframe is simplified, and some mesh disappear in viewport) imagine fly trough animation with 50% time blocked view by leavesAny thing else: Vproxy its a life saver for me. BTW can you put animated mesh in Vproxy? and have it animated as proxy? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 Right...that's what I'm talkin about, that's 1.34 minutes of my life I'll never get back... Anyway I didn't mean to turn your post into a Vray vs MRay discussion, but in this area I don't think Vray has much competition, Mental ray has come along way in the user friendly area, but there are still a couple things it needs like this for example... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 Totally agree, no argument there. I wish Mental had it JHV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mskin Posted February 28, 2007 Author Share Posted February 28, 2007 "heavy instancing provides for rendering many copies of an object at different transformations without replicating the object data in memory" - from mental images. i guess to answer my own question, i instanced and copied hundreds of trees. no doubt the instanced trees rendered faster (or i should say at all... the other method crashed)... but no where near 1.34 minutes. i set it of an hour ago and its 11.1% through final gather. there has to be a better way with mental ray. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 You are going to wait for ever if you are FGing the trees. Do yourself a favour by hiding the trees during FG, freeze the FGM, unhide the trees and rerender. There is no real benifit in getting the trees to bounce light, especially one in the mid to backround. If there is a tree right in the foreground and its a major part of the scene, then possible include it in the FG. Not to sound to harsh here but I think you need to pause and think through what you are trying to achieve and how you are going to get there. Its going to save you alot of pain later. JHV PS 1.34 minutes at what resolution? at what AA? what GI settings? Polycount? Lighting setup? .... there are alot of variables not taken into consideration. I am impressed that that many trees can be rendered, but not by the time, its meaningless. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 It was at 640 x 480 Adaptive subdivision for the AA one omni light with vray shadows Irradiance for primary and QMC for secondary 91,000,000 polygons, give or take Everything pretty much default settings, if you have any specific requests for a test just let me know... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 Sorry I didn't mean it as a stab at your effort, it was more to highlight the fact that by just giving a time for something to render isn't giving a clear and true reflection solution to the problem. All your example prooved to me was that it is possible to render out 100's of complex trees, Great. However by stating how long it took has clouded the issue. 1.43 at 640X480 is avarage, multiply that out to a decent print resolution (4000 longest side) and tell me how long. This is one of my biggest bug bears with most tutorials, They sprout how quick it is, but fail to say they are working at a rediculously low resolutions. JHV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 Ok, so I made my own request, this one has 10X as many trees, 7,500 for a wopping 910,000,000 polys, same settings except rendered at 2,000 x 480, it was tough to get all the trees into the picture...it took 8.16 minutes to render... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 beat me to it , nice one. JHV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 And the really funny part is, that I'm doing this on my laptop, not some dual quad monster...the memory never goes above 1.05gigs... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted February 28, 2007 Share Posted February 28, 2007 answered my next question before I got to ask it, OK point prooved thanks, any solutions for Metal? JHV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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