Large Site Project Issues

[bentegviz]

so i am leaning towards an answer to my problem already when asking but here goes anyways.

 

i'm workinig on a project for a client. it started off simple. a warehouse. single story. metal siding displaced to get the right look of it. a few shrubs near the entrances, a few trees here and there. all vegetation is vray proxies as well.

 

but when i instance the warehouse a few times, it starts to add up. then add in the 3d site plan imported from autocad civil 3d. and my machine starts to crawl. using max 2009, and vray sp2. i have a year old dell xps. quad core. 4gb ram. probably a lackluster graphics card nvidia 8600 gt. running windows xp 32-bit.

 

i'm assuming the problems with max's stability and memory issues are due to xp-32 or my 8600 gfx card. i can't really justify to my boss's the need for a new graphics card of a 64-bit os as 3d viz work has trailed off to almost a standstill. but i'm wondering if there are any workarounds? or if the os and gfx card are the main culprits?

 

thanks very much for viewing and/or responding.

[Cocytus09]

Maybe it's not your Hardware.... sometimes it has to do with how you manage your files and system resources. One of my workstations is similar to what you have down to the graphics card, and it can handle some pretty big scenes.

 

A while back I used to blame my hardware for all my slow processing and crashing problems, and would insist to my ex-bosses to upgrade my system when all I really needed was to tweak a few things to manage my memory nd processing better.

 

Try using xrefs. Isolate your vegetation and create an xref file of just your vegetation. Enable bitmap proxies. Sometimes there are some texture resolutions that are way to high for materials.... just some suggestions.

[bentegviz]

thanks for the reply. i hadn't heard of the bitmap proxy before. and maybe i should xref all the vegetation and the site itself since the site i think is the majority of the problem. i think civil 3d put far too many triangles when it made the mesh.

[BrianKitts]

set your proxies to display by bounding box instead of preview from file. Will save your videocard on the heavy processing.

[Horhe]

set your proxies to display by bounding box instead of preview from file. Will save your videocard on the heavy processing.

 

Not only that, set anything (that has a fair amount of faces that you are not working on but need to keep in the current scene, to display as a box in your scene.