Is "more RAM" the right answer?

[theory]

to all those of you who use the 3ds max plugin, how do you go about high-poly objects without having ram usage blow up,

 

i was recently working on this urban exterior scene, supposedly a busy street around the rush hour, with around 10 high-poly cars along with some onyxtree bushes through Tree storm (used random seed variation) and all that added up to a grand total of 4 GB of ram for 3ds max!

[Camby1298]

Nowadays, 4 gb of ram or a scene is not that bad, and add that with a number of plants, cars, or other entourage etc I reckon a scene containing those kind of elements would run around 6-8 gigs...

[theory]

i can see what you mean, only, feeding a scene more ram is always a bad idea, optimization is the magic word when it comes to heavy scenes, typical heavy scene require well over 8 gigs, my attitude is that for lighting i use high res HDRIs that would stand in as backplates along with some similarly big textures and to top it off you gotta throw in a little real-time tweaking using the fire render preview, and after all that if you can manage to make it to the render node window you gotta have the mighty multilight system on, all i'm saying is that there're other renderers that handle similar issues vray's proxy/external reference bit is quite helpful..

[Camby1298]

i can see what you mean, only, feeding a scene more ram is always a bad idea, optimization is the magic word when it comes to heavy scenes, typical heavy scene require well over 8 gigs, my attitude is that for lighting i use high res HDRIs that would stand in as backplates along with some similarly big textures and to top it off you gotta throw in a little real-time tweaking using the fire render preview, and after all that if you can manage to make it to the render node window you gotta have the mighty multilight system on, all i'm saying is that there're other renderers that handle similar issues vray's proxy/external reference bit is quite helpful..

 

One of the many reasons why Vray is an industry standard; and Maxwell (while can produce some impressive results) can be difficult for production.