Hello.

I’m currently trying to run some animation clips using Max 2011. My scene is organized in containers, so that the file size is only as big as 32 MB. The total number of polys (containers loaded) is around 7 million. Most of the geometry is solved in proxies. My file opens and saves quite normal (fast).

My problem comes when I try to run a 300frames “Animated Sequence File” in 720x480 output to JPEG’s. The process takes a very long time even when the CPU / RAM usage is not quite high. Actually I haven’t yet completed the process because I always think something is wrong after some time. The frames are actually created, but Max gets not responsive and the machine slows down.

It’s hard to grasp that this is so, when I’m not really trying to render production; no GI, no reflections or glossies, etc.

My machine:
i7 2.8 GHz
8 GB DDR3 RAM
Nvidia Quadro FX 580

Thanks in advance.

I doubt the problem is with the image sequence, much more likely the scene itself. More information like which renderer, what settings, what type of lighting etc will help give folks a better idea od what may be the problem.

And do yourself a favour - never render to a lossy format like jpeg. Always use a lossless format (tga, tif, png).

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

A render at that resolution without a complex lighting and material setup should not be a big deal for an i7 machine.

The process takes a very long time

What do you call a very long time? It’s a fact of life that rendering takes time, some people have unrealistic expectations about how long things actually take. My scenes vary from taking 2 seconds to 2 hours per frame to render depending on complexity and type of render. Some wait several hours for a single frame.

Well, apparently one of the containers was causing the problem. It has a big bunch of plants as vray proxies and some heavy boulders. I suddenly could not open this file and the erratic behavior came back. So, I inherited the container in a fresh file, made local contents, deleted the container and re-saved, of course, turned the polycount on the boulders way down. So, either something was wrong with the file or the boulders were playing up.

I did more previews of the general scene with no problems; I hope that was it.

Thanks guys.