Very large project 3m polys and counting - what system Ram would be required?

[Nats]

Hi I am new to 3dsmax and working on a private project which just about has everything possible in it - several large buildings, banks of roads and grass, trees, the sea, several complex boat exhibits outside, lots of people, lots of cars, complex tubular roof structures, etc etc. Suffice it to say the size of the file to date is 160Mb and poly count is over 3 million and I have yet to apply lighting and mapping - so its a big scene I would think even for a decent Arch Vis render. I am mainly using it to learn with but obviously I do want to render some nice views as well at the end of the day.

 

At the moment I have 32bit Max, 3Gb Ram and only WinXP Home so Max is crashing when I try to render past 600x480 size due to memory. Also, considering I dont have much of an idea about rendering settings yet, I am uncertain whether these are set right or are far too high - at the moment I am trying to render with settings kept as Max comes ie default.

 

Now what I would like to know is:

 

Firstly is this a reasonable size for a complex Arch Vis project at all or is it well over the top. Just out of interest what are reasonable Arch Vis file sizes usually? I know its probably a matter of 'how long is a piece of string' but getting an idea of typical maximum file sizes to aim for would be useful to know for the future.

 

Secondly I want to upgrade to 64 bit Max, Windows 7 64 bit, and get more RAM to cope with rendering such scenes. What RAM should I get? Would 8MB be sufficient do you think to enable me to render large scenes reasonably well? The official Autodesk system requirements say 8Mb is ok but is it very suitable in practice for large scenes?

 

Thank you for any comments.

Edited July 21, 2010 by Nats

[Nats]

Just seen a forum message about someone having 27M polys in a scene so I guess this isnt that large after all!

 

Just found out though that my motherboard cant take more than 4GB RAM. Maybe in time I will be able to afford to upgrade to a new motherboard. But at the moment I am upgrading to Windows 7 64bit (From 32bit XP) and 4GB RAM (instead of 3GB) and hopefully that may help render this scene successfully.

 

Could anyone comment on how large a scene this kind of set up may be able to reasonably handle without crashing? I really need to get this rendered after all this work!! HELP :-/ Do I have to cut the poly detail down?

 

Also if anyone could help with some useful non-too-serious rendering limits I could apply to get this rendered without losing too much detail taht would be really helpful - I am completely unknowledgable about mental ray rendering at the moment?

[abmitalia]

I'm afraid its difficult to give you rules how to manage the sice of a scene. To be able to render a complex scene remember that the first aspect is to organice your scene in layers and groups, so for need you can hide different objects more easelly when they are not necessarry fo a camera shot . If you use turbosmooth use it as render itineration , so you keep down the polycounts. Try to render regions and than put them together in photoshop. Try out all solutions ... as everybody in this forum in past did to learn keeping down polycount. Good luck RK

[BrianKitts]

biggest key to rendering large poly scenes is to be on a 64bit system with a minimum of 8 gigs of RAM and to make use of proxy objects and dynamic memory.

 

another big time saver is to break your scene up into mulitple files that are xref'd together. Do not work in one giant large file, you'll spend half of your day waiting on it to save and open.