Hi all,

Just looking for information from experienced users on max features such as the bitmap pager, Translator options panel( ie placeholder options, mr map manager, conserve memory), strip rendering and any other things people know about that can help when rendering large scenes. I am using max 32 bit with 3gig switch. I am really looking for general discussion on the topic to hopefully gain some knowledge from those who are experienced in using max and mental ray.

I have looked through everything i could find in old posts, Autodesk knowledge base and the max user reference to get me started but would still like a bit more detail if possible.

To get started, what is the process you would follow if you had a large scene that was causing max to crash on render because it was out of memory?

What i have done is:

- Saved a low res final gather map
- Switched on bitmap pager and played round with the settings (not 100% sure about these)
- Played round with the options in the translator options panel (not sure how well these all work together, and with the bitmap pager)
- Used bitmap proxies to lower the res of bitmaps
- Using large bsp option
- Using backburner to do a net render with strip rendering (1 computer)

Would really appreciate any help people can give

Thanks

Sounds like you might already know all this, but check out my blog here:

http://rand.com/imaginit/1/rss/viewitem.asp?feedid=BLOGS_VISUAL_ALL&guid=303

The Lazy Man’s Guide to NOT CRASHING.

Pixels, Polygons, get’m while their hot

I recall hearing some advice that attaching elements together to reduce the “object footprint” of the scene can help. I have not done any official testing on this however.

Has anyone else ever heard this?

Max Design 2012 SP2 / Win 7 Pro
NVidia Quadro FX 4800 x 2 (non sli)
HP Z800 - 2 Xeon X5680 @ 3.33 GHz; 36 GB ram

Hi pyro777,

Reducing Object numbers in scene can help the scene faster.

I attach objects that comprise of same Building such as columns, windows, etc. can help pretty much.

"Nature is the Mother of Learning”

Please visit http://www.handy-arts.com

Thanks for the replies,

I think i do probably need to work a bit on optimising my scenes into the future. Another suggestion i did find was to uncheck the scanline option under rendering algorithms panel. This let me get a A4 size render of my scene at 300dpi where it had been crashing previously. I don’t know presicisely what effect doing this had but i’m pretty sure there was a bit more noise and jaggedness in the render.

Has anyone else encountered the problem of having images becoming washed out when they do a strip render? Whenever i do one the strips look fine but after they are joined back together the brightness of the image seems to jump and it becomes washed out. Any suugestions?

Cheers