max2010 - mental ray proxy memory limit? (crashing)

[wasteland giant]

doing a scene last night. Had a bunch of trees in it and my machine is the latest and greatest (not at work now) and it has 8gigs of ram.

 

The scene had a bunch of 3D trees in it and I think because of this, it ran out of memory and crashed. Any good way to gauge performance/workability with the proxies? It acted like it wasn't pulling the trees out of proxy as the scene itself was 2mllionish polygons, only the trees were alot and, well, that's the problem.

 

 

mentalray/max/render has run out of memory and render has been stopped was the error message that shows up.

 

time to do some googling

[Bundie]

Good question,

I had the exact same thing happen to me a few nights ago trying to render (with MR) a simple interior with a fluffy rug proxy!!!

havent found a solution yet though, sorry

[Justin Hunt]

I assume you are using BSB2 and have "Use Placeholders" ticked?

 

I have successfully rendered of 100's of trees and 1000's of plants with only 4gig of RAM.

[wasteland giant]

yeah using BSP2. I'll post screen grabs +error messages shortly. Trying to troubleshoot this. I know it should work better but its not and pissing me off.

 

Edited June 24, 2010 by wasteland giant

[Justin Hunt]

top of my head it could be a corrupt proxie, I havn't seen a "broken Pipe" error message before

[datacrasher]

how much memory do you have? okay you have 8gb i would increase the amount of memory are you using are you using AEC foliage? if so these are very intensive on the memory I would try and find a tutorial on modeling a tree

 

Good luck

DC

[aristocratic3d]

Funny thing is I rendered a scene with 5000 trees in core 2 duo and 4 gig of ram. machine was 32 bit.

But now I bought a core i7 and 64 bit with 4 gb ram. I cant render that scene.! its showing error!

[datacrasher]

if you make small scene then the amount of memory you can use is Minimal but once you scenes get bigger You need about a lot more memory. i know it seems a pain in max and other animation programs but thats life lol

[padre.ayuso]

yeah using BSP2. I'll post screen grabs +error messages shortly. Trying to troubleshoot this. I know it should work better but its not and pissing me off.

 

I'd make sure that your trees have A&D materials on. They perhaps are standard materials with an opacity map stuck? If so, your memory will be very much consumed. Last week I did a scene with 4million polys in a 64 bit with 8 cores and 4GB of RAM and it worked fine. Oh, ensure that you have as many materials instanced as you can. Make sure your materials are not named the same but they are different (Default 1 being a street and Default 1 being a tree). Anyhow, those are some of my ideas, I might even come up with more once you try those and let me know.

[nomanrahid]

Check xp's virtual memory settings Autodesk recommend you set its minimum size to twice your actual ram.

 

on 4bg of ram I would set virtual memory to Custom Size

Inital size: 8 gb

Max size: 12/24 gb

 

if you set inital size and max size to the same it will stop windows from

resizing it on the fly so if your gonna do that make sure you give it as much as you can afford at least 24gb more if you hard drives big enough.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I have run into errors in the past when we moved from Max2009 to Max2010. Suddenly our heavier proxied scenes crapped out. The error was never fixed so I found myself going back to Vray more and more after that.

 

When you rendered on the 32bit machine, were you using the same version of Max that you were when you rendered on the 64bit machine?

[aristocratic3d]

maybe i was used 2008 version.

[wasteland giant]

Well, I dragged out the onyx tree suite we had and made some lower poly trees and they render all right. Don't look so shithot up close but at least I can do way more trees now.

 

One of these days, when I'm free, I'll do a polygon limit on what I can do on my machine.

 

 

we're using windows 7 here. Where's the setting to increase virtual memory? Thanks for all the posts.

[Bundie]

wasteland giant

 

the virtual settings are in the following:

Control Panel\System and Security\System

click on the Advanced System Settings tab on the left column

Click on the Advanced tab

under Performance click on Settings

Click Advance tab again

and you should see Virtual Memory

 

there may be a quicker way to find it, but im still trying to navigate my way through Win7

[padre.ayuso]

That works for me!!!! Everyone in the office had it on but me and I was wondering why some of my scenes would run out of memory on my computer and not theirs... By the way, to get to the System Properties faster, Press Windows and then Paus/Break key, it should do the trick on Win 7 I imagine.

[Spacelord]

Was this an animation or still ?

I found a while ago when creating the Final Gather map for an animation with lots of proxies 3dsmax would crash.

It seems it wasn't releasing the memory. I think the latest hotfix was meant to fix this.

 

cheers

[Bundie]

For me it happened on a still, surprising cause its not a complicated scene at all,

Not sure about wasteland giant........its his thread, sorry for butting in

[jinsley]

Have you cleaned your multi-mats? I run into the odd time when max decides it doesn't like one of the multi-mats that I am using with the onyx trees... so it is a material problem rather than the geometry. I just need to remove the problem proxy and re-insert it into the scene after checking that the multi-material has been cleaned.

 

I render ALOT of polys using proxies and MR... like 60 - 100 million +.

 

A link to some of my foliage tests to see how much I can jam into a scene on top of my models...

 

http://forums.cgarchitect.com/37505-grass-test-using-particle-flow-mr-6.html

 

I usually use around 60,000 grass proxies, a 100 - 200 trees (150,000 - 450,000 polys) and shrubbery. Maybe your trees are super high detail, over 1 million polys?

 

I am on 2010 with 8GB of ram.

[Bundie]

Thats an amazing image, and very insightfull thread, well done jinsley.

 

What do you mean by 'clean the Multi-Materials'?

not use them? or is it a naming issue?

[Spacelord]

Thats an amazing image, and very insightfull thread, well done jinsley.

 

What do you mean by 'clean the Multi-Materials'?

not use them? or is it a naming issue?

 

I guess he means removing any materials from a mutlisub that aren't being used and nested mutlisubs.

I've found trees from xfrog will have 10 materials in multisub and only 3 or 4 are being used.

[jinsley]

Thats an amazing image, and very insightfull thread, well done jinsley.

 

What do you mean by 'clean the Multi-Materials'?

not use them? or is it a naming issue?

 

Exactly what Duncan said... remove any of the slots that aren't being used in your multi-sub... some xfrog trees are horrible, for messy multi-sub materials, but work great once you clean them up.

[Bundie]

ah cool, I thought maybe I couldnt use multi mats at all.

 

cheers

[jinsley]

ah cool, I thought maybe I couldnt use multi mats at all.

 

cheers

 

no, multi mats are a must with foliage and putting together your trees etc... sometimes they just get a little funky if you're not paying attention or sitting up all night trying to meet deadlines.

[wasteland giant]

All this is very interesting. Thanks for the posts + link James. I've been doing a bit of model cleanup and what not. A lot of my files are split btw MR+vray and you really need to clean them up to get the right sort of rendering happening.

 

:thumbsup

[jinsley]

...A lot of my files are split btw MR+vray ...

 

ouch, not fun sometimes when it comes to getting missing map and .dll messages... I have been trying to get dbr and a farm going in the office lately and the MR files with models merged or imported with VRay components always kill me trying to purge all of the VRay...