Hello all!
I’m using MentalRay with 32bit version of 3dsMAX2009. I`m interesting for modeling a wide number of objects spread over large surface. For example, filed of flowers like this:

There is a problem with memory in MR. Even if I use models of different LODs (more complex models for close view and simple ones for distance), 3dsMAX crashes down due to not enough amount of memory (Intel i7, 4Gb RAM, WinXP SP2).

Is there any tricks/tweaks in MR when rendering forests, flowers, crouds and so on?
Thank you!

PZ 01 March 2010 01:39 PM

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Is there any tricks/tweaks in MR when rendering forests, flowers, crouds and so on?
Thank you!

There is and a very powerful one; the “mr Proxy Object”, but the tool exist only in Max 2010, just the solution you are after.

You are with Max 2009 so try a particle solution, take a look here: http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/pflow_for_creating_a_grass_land

ivan

MR Proxy Objects are in Max 2009. Jeff Patton has a page on his blog about them, Link. Some other tips I’ve read are to turn off scanline in the Rendering Algorithms rollout and change the raytrace acceleration to BSP2.

3ds Max 2009 SP1, 2010 SP1
Maya 2012
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5520, 6 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 OC

MK-3D 01 March 2010 03:33 PM

MR Proxy Objects are in Max 2009…

You are right MK, they are really there, but I wanted to attach a link to the “forest” tutorial and didn’t find it in the 2009 Help file, here I have it only in the 2010 version.
That misguided me, thanks for the info.
Then it is OK that is the solution.

ivan

	Attachment

Realize that once you get 50 meters from the camera, you won’t need full 3D models. Even with MR Proxy objects, you’ll probably have to cheat a lot.

-jeff

Max/Composite 2012 (subscription)
Win7-64pro, Intel i7-hex on SuperMicro mobo, 12 GB RAM
nVidia Quadro 5000, render farmette on BB2012

Well, I’ve tried to use a fake objects for the most distant flowers. That was just 2d-polygons with flower texture applied and Cutout map (A&D material). Frankly it doesn’t get realistic result. Even at the horizon they look flat and ugly.
I’m reading Jeff Patton’s blog about mrProxy. I think MAX’s Croud system should help me to scatter them over my 3d ground. I’ll show the results in this thread as they appear :-)

Here is my today’s test render with mrProxy and Crowd. The results are terrific. Even on my office PC with only 1Gb RAM, I could easily render 5000 full-scale roses with 22519 faces each! I guess I don’t need such a dense mesh in real project, but for this test I just take a rose from my previews project and the results was very impressive.

I’ve tried PFlow for scattering plants on the gorund and it takes too much time to me to set up all the parameters. Furthermore, I cannot transform the results to mesh(meshes) to get some manual tweaks. Snapshot tool doesn’t work with pFlow. Crowd gets fast and predictable results. I really like this feature.