Geez, this is a humongous consulting help, thanks for the information! Im copyng everything into a text file, and I will be looking for the compositing route idea.

I have 1 g of ram, scanline.

I really have to repay you guys someday for all this help. Really, thanks.

Can you tell me more about the compositing route technique? It is about rendering really big things?

saenzkovsky - 14 September 2008 04:00 PM

I have 1 g of ram, scanline.

Seems to me the fastest and least expensive way to have any improvement would be to add another gig of RAM to your system.

Chris Medeck - 12 September 2008 11:29 AM

You can get XP 64-bit version, as I stated.  It will use more than 2GB of RAM.  From what I’ve heard, most people prefer to use XP over Vista.  XP has been around a while, and most major issues have been dealt with.  Vista is still new, and Max hasn’t had time to really get itself adjusted to the new OS.

To take advantage of XP 64bit and the additional RAM, is the 64bit version of MAX required?

The 32bit version of Max will still be fine on XP64 (only really necessary if you have over 3GB RAM BTW), XP64 will allow Max to render using a lot more memory, we used to have no end of exception errors in Vray under XP 32bit where the render would hit the ceiling of available memory on large renders, those errors dissapeared completely in XP64.

But if your running XP64 and lots of Ram it would make sense to use the 64bit version of Max, unless of course your render farm can only run 32bit then it might be worth either sticking to Max 32bit or remembering to only render to 32bit. Ideally update the render farm.

To answer the previous question re: Compositing, yes it’s typically used where you have large scenes, and specifically to overcome some of the memory issues you have been having, but it is also ideal where you have different elements in the scene that might need to be updated and rerendered.

i.e. in it’s simplest form for your housing scheme, you might render all the houses or groups of houses and render the trees and people as a separate pass, these would all be compositied separately, this means when your houses are complete they could be final rendered giving you a finished pass that doesn’t need to be rendered again. The trees or people can then be worked up and regularly check rendered and composited to the houses without having to rerender the whole file every time. This will save you major headaches as the deadline looms and also ensures that you can be safe in the knowledge that at least some of the important elements are in the bag.

As you get more used to the process you can render separate passes for the shadows, irradience, diffuse colours, zdepth, anything you like, this becomes very powerful as it gives you control over the individual elements in post production, colour adjust, darken the shadows etc. etc. We often render out of Vray with a velocity channel which can then be used in fusion to provide correct motion blur, it’s easier to control and tweak in Fusion and makes the Max renders much quicker.

Simple tip just render the passes with alpha channel against black, this will provide the easiest compositing process and don’t forget to implement either premultiply by Alpha in Max or post multiply in the compositing software to avoid halo’s around your passes. You might find that using exr file formats are preferable to lots of elements renders, we prefer these now to rla or rpf’s

Hum… interesting.... Can you give to me some keywords to google for? V-ray proxy must be a good one, I will have to study a lot because my current hardware dont handle all the 1400 buildings that is in it very well yet, and I dont know when I will be able to jump to another pc.

Proxies are one side of your solution, they simply replace identical geometry and reference it back to one instance of the object, this potentially saves huge memory as the renderer in question doesn’t need to hold information about each and every instance of the object in memory.

Compositing is a different process something like this might help: click on the link

if ya want a mega render machine check out click on the link

Some render tests result here:
The storming sea scene click on the link file 24 frames in resolution 4000x4000 pixels.

- On a MacPro 2 x DualCore Xenon 2.66 Ghz with 4 GB ram
took 552 minutes (9.2 h)

- Helmer did same 24 frames in 4k format in 64 min.

Some approximate numbers give Helmer a floating point capacity of 186 Gflops

Very interesting the Helmer machine. And it is running linux hun? This guy looks like that it hes getting crazy, look at this:
“Render jobs that took all night, now gets done in 10-12 min.”
And theres Helmer 2 and 3, very very crazy. And f*cking usefull information indeed!

I did read the compostion article. Very interesting. If I was doing something like a website in flash, I maybe try using png with transparent backgrounds to join two things togheter. I dont know, maybe flash uses that compostion process hidden, when doing things like using transparent pngs and masks. I want to see this working for 3d, like, the 3dmax is good at rendering things separated to merge togheter later? I will keep looking for more information about that.

Something that really helped me in first tests was to use v-ray to render a lot of houses. I did it with 1800 houses and the result is great. Max does not get slow when dealing with a lot of vray proxy-es, in render and in max work runtime too. The houses dont even need to be in box-display mode to get this result.

Its strange, because when in school they said that a instanciated object is something that inherits the things from a main object. That is the same description of proxy works, but works amazing better (sorry the bad english).

Now I can see the possibility of keep working ahead and try more difficulty things, like to add trees and things like that.

I have another question… it is possible to easy reaplace max objects for vray proxy meshes? Like, theres any kind of tool that replaces several objects for others, and using rotation and positions from the replaced object?