[Max, MR] Animation Crashing - BP on, what are best settings?

[spittle]

How can I determine the best settings for the Bitmap pager?

 

I really need to get something rendered... before christmas!

 

1800 frame animation, exterior scene, low polys, mr sun & sky.

 

Antialiasing 1,4, but would like to re render at 1, 16.

 

FG map locked and read only (rendered FG map every 10 frames)

 

Very large google earth images 2 images over 4000pix wide. Leaf textures and alphas on AutoCAD AEC trees. Also bark,

 

Brick texture on walls but not many of them.

 

One of the google earth images has an alpha being used in a blend material with mr Arch Design Water material to blend between google earth image and reserviour. Alpha is actually separate, not using Tiff images.

 

The best I've got is up to 700 ish frames (not sure cause I just rang work so don't know but when I left it was on about 600).

 

Animation is nothing special, just a flythrough.

 

Bitmap pager settings off top of my head about:

 

128

20000

50000

 

Sytem

 

2x Xeon 2.66GHz Quad core Processor

8GB Ram

XP64

Max 64

 

I've been posting on CG forum but this forum looks specific to what I'm doing.

Are there any never fail settings?

[pfbreton]

What version of max are you using?

[mattclinch]

with that much ram, i wouldn't expect it to be a paging issue with your maps. i have less RAM and regularly use 4 or 5 5k maps in a scene.

 

check your scene location and BSP settings - it might be that your BSP tree file is getting too big? not sure. seems strange for it to render 700 farmes then dump out. are you using cached geometry?

[spittle]

Max 2009 64 - Have 2010 also that I could install too. Wanted to stick with 09 as am familiar with it.

 

Scene Location?

BSP Settings?

 

Never used cached geometry setting, did a search and get the idea. Any tips for using it e.g. I saw a tutorial for avoiding flickering rendering by rendering FG map every 10 frames and then making it read only so as to use the same map for 10 frames...

 

there are lots of polys on the trees & bushes but the other stuff is very crappy low poly buildings i.e. 6 polys for a house.

 

One reason perhaps from crapping out after as the flythrough progresses is because the camera flies closer to the scene where you see textures closer up and animated water.

 

However, it initially crashing whilst far away from the detailed stuff and single frames render anywhere along the animation.

 

Also the frames were only taking about 20 secs each to render at about 1024 wide (at home so can't remember).

Edited January 6, 2010 by spittle