Render Theory - 3dsmax Polygon limit

[Adam H. Stewart]

I am working on a project - can't really say what - but it involves lots of heavy geom. I am concerned about the number of polygons 32bit 3dsmax 7 can happily handle, ballpark. It involves a number of objects walking across a desert landscape, I have one of these almost ready to rig but it is still very heavy in terms of polygons, what ballpark polygon limit should I be trying to keep under ?

Thanks as always for your help.

[DaForce]

depends.. I wouldnt go near more than 1-2million tops before your viewport freaks out. But depends if you have animation mesh deformations it will crawl to a hault.. same goes for particles..etc..
Turn as many of the objects to bounding box view as possible.

If your talking about rendering polys.. well then its more about how much ram you have and how you setup your render. I rendered about 11billion polys with proxy (true story) so its certainly possible.

[GALACTUS]

Say thats not transformers, is it

[Dynedain]

Max seems to have more of a problem with lots of objects than with lots of polys.

If you're having multiple of these walkers in a scene, I'd recommend doing each one separately and comping them together. That's what the company who modeled them did when they worked with them

[Adam H. Stewart]

Thanks guys

Billions - Holy Shizzle !!

Thanks guys - we are starting to iron these things out, upgrading the farm to Max 9, getting the performance boost ect. It will be fun to show you some of this stuff when it is done ( it might surprize you, it is the same but different to what you might think :] )- that is assuming we get it done :] - we are on a crazy ski-slope production schedule.

Wish me luck

Thanks as always.

[DaForce]

Best of luck

Yeah 11 billion, some 4.6million 50segment sphere proxies. Was my entry for the cgsphere.com website. Its kinda of like a mandelbrot fractal, spheres instanced MANY MANY times around themselves, then that group of instances instances again around the next bigger sphere at so on. You cant even see the smallest spheres.
See here
http://www.cgsphere.com/media/submis...7a327edf48.jpg

Sure it was all instances but hey.. you try working the view port with 4.6million instances.. it doesnt happen easily. LONG waits between screen updates.

[Adam H. Stewart]

looks sweet

That looks very sweet indeed

[DaForce]

hehe thanks.

It was meant more as a technical piece than a visual piece. But still ended up looking pretty cool I think