A few question on improving rendering stability with modelling

[monkeyman905]

Hi, i just have a few questions about rendering in 3Dmax while using Vray as im now getting the bitmap error of not enough memory! Ive googled this and had a look at a lot of the fixes. Ive just done the 3GB boot.ini and that has worked but with less than half of my scene textured then im a bit worried it would stay like this for long. Im doing a big new york scene with 3 skyscrapper with a lot of detail, hitting well over 250,000 polys. Ill post WIP when i get home. Basically how in my modeling / procees can i improve my memory usage when rendering???

 

1. They are a hell of a lot of windows in my scene does making referances instead of copys save memory??

 

2. Would making smaller maps and using multiplying u and v's save on the memory??

 

3. Does 64bit windows with say 8GB actually use 8GB when rendering seen as it does not have the limit 32bit has??

 

4. Any other memory saving tips or tricks??

 

 

Any comment or opinions would be greatly recieved

 

Thank you

 

Phil

[Thablanch]

 

1. They are a hell of a lot of windows in my scene does making referances instead of copys save memory??

 

Instances are for sure saving memory. If you can make some use of Vray Proxies, even better..

 

2. Would making smaller maps and using multiplying u and v's save on the memory??

 

The type of map influences as well. If you load, lets say a 2000x2000 image, if you load it in .jpg, it can be something like 950kb, and in tif, 35megs.. lots of theses maps can influence the scene. At one point, I had a huge scene not going through anymore, and changing all my maps from tif to jpg allowed me to keep going on. In the render time, Max reads the pixel information only, but tho soft. still needs to open the fils(s)

 

3. Does 64bit windows with say 8GB actually use 8GB when rendering seen as it does not have the limit 32bit has??

 

64bits will solve all your problems. Not just with ram, it does handle things better, period.

 

4. Any other memory saving tips or tricks??

There is quite a few of them..

Free up memory, close other programs, free up memory. Photoshop with 24 big images open takes up some place on your machine.

Use Backburner. Even if you loop it in your own machine. ( close your main Max session, of course)

Play with the static/dynamic memory ( read a little on it before, cause your render times can get quite enormous)

Use Vray image format. That is the most effective one!.

[monkeyman905]

wow! Thanks for anwsering all that great help and a lot for me to research their!!

 

Heard of Vray Proxies but never used them so ill hav a look on that front. Droped all images to .jepgs already! Might try drop there quality 1 or 2 knocks!

 

64bit will be a future upgrade have vista so ill wait for windows 7 and go 64bit on that, also the xp mode makes it more appealing.

 

never used backburner dont even know what it is for, so ill look in 2 that, i know its something you get with max but never tried opening it! ill also look into the vray image format, i have come across it before but not in great depth.

 

Again thank you

[monkeyman905]

Proxy looks like it could be want i need as my work flow was slowing down to a stupid rate, here a tut for anyone browsing this thread! http://www.evermotion.org/tutorials/show/7857/v-ray-proxy-in-use-

 

Argh i get wat backburner is cool, is it easy to set up just to work on a computer rather than a network??

Edited June 19, 2009 by monkeyman905

[Nic H]

250,000 polys isnt many.

 

your problem i bet is you have ALOT of objects in your scene. Collapse as much as possible together as possible. i.e all your windows are one poly / mesh object, not 100,000 single panes of glass. Do the same with everything and get a few objects as possible in your scene and I bet it will be fine (as well as easy to work with)

 

hide objects you arent working on, box mode, no textures whatever will speed up your viewport. xref in stuff as well if its annoying you in a large scene.

 

changing textures to jpgs at shitty quality will not help, its the pixel dimension that counts (to a point) how big are your maps and how many of them are there anyway?

 

vray proxy would be overkill for what you are doing, it would be useful if once you finished your towers you wanted 100 of them, dont use it for lots of simple objects. waste.

[Thablanch]

 

Argh i get wat backburner is cool, is it easy to set up just to work on a computer rather than a network??

 

It is quite easy to set up.. The main advantage, Max does not load all the overhead... you send it from your computer to your computer. See the help files for a step by step procedure

[dean@pikcells]

bitmap dimensions can kill machines easily if you dont keep an eye on them! only use the size bitmap you need, for example, a flag at the top of a tower may only be rendered as a tiny proportion of the view (say 10px by 10px), but Ive seen people use 1000px by 1000px.

 

as for proxies, definately use em! or atleast learn em so when you need them they are there!

[monkeyman905]

Thanks guys im going to try all these options and ill let you know how i get on, heres the scene im working with:

 

 

[ATTACH]32925[/ATTACH]

Edited June 20, 2009 by monkeyman905