"Collapse" Utility

[Michael J. Brown]

I read in a recent thread ("other memory saving options?") that "collapsing" multiple objects (or an entire scene) into one would reduce the amount of RAM required to render the same number of objects/polygons.

 

Is this true?

 

Would rendering time be shortened by collapsing objects, or just RAM usage reduced?

[ARTECmedia]

only ram ussage and display performance.

[Matt Clementson]

Would rendering time be shortened by collapsing objects, or just RAM usage reduced?

The 'Preparing Geometry' step of rendering can be shortened by collapsing object stacks. Also, if you're hitting your RAM limit and paging then the reduced RAM usage can speed up the renders - but this is more a side-effect of not paging than anything else.

[Brian Cassil]

I believe this is true but has anyone else ever noticed that the file size grows to about triple when you do this?

[Chad Warner]

It kind of makes sense that the file size would grow--all the procedures that Max is doing in RAM gets dumped to the actual file, so less RAM would equal more file size.

[Matt Clementson]

Yes the file size will increase - instead of storing 'sphere radius r position x,y,z' it now has to store every vertex position, the face and edge arrays, etc. The trade off is that you don't have the geometry preparation step at render time.