Need help, crashing at 1.9 million polys

[j.galang]

Hello. I would like to ask for some help with a scene that is about 1.9 million polys big. It has a lot of geometry typical of a large and very detailed architectural viz scene. Lots of textures but they are pretty manageable in terms of size (around 200 MB worth of jpegs at around 1,100 files).

Vray keeps crashing saying the old unhandled exception thing. We still use 1.09.03r since we are waiting for the official release of 1.5 before we make the change. There isn't 1 large mesh object that why instances are not really useful (although i did try, still crashed). Half of the objects are editable meshes and half have a 2 to 3 level mod stack still intact for future revisions.

I really don't know why the render is crashing, i have rendered bigger scenes than this (but honestly above 2M it gets a little tricky). Any tips on how i can prevent crashing without going into mas remodeling to get the polycount down? Any help from Vado and Chaos will also be much appreciated. Thanks.

JG

[meanadam]

Hey - good timing. See my post in the bug section today.

Good luck.... I am remodeling as we speak.

[RErender]

Don't let jpegs fool you, they blow up many times their size when in memory. You might want to try the bitmap pager and see if that helps. My guess is your running out of memory, what is the usage when it crashes?

[j.galang]

1,681,238 something

i know that i am running out of memory, but i already resized my jpegs by 50% (using batch resize in ACDSee). this is the curious thing too. when i open the file my memory usage goes as high as 1,127,364 something. that's just opening the file!!

hiding 400,000+ polys makes me able to render the scene, but i can't hide those thigs, i need to show them

JG

PS. vlado help !!!

[serge]

in your viewport try to set your rendering level to bounding box
save your scene and restart max
it must save memory for rendering

[dennis]

it didnt work well for meanadam but try the dynamic memory option in vray system rollout it has worked for me and if you have lots of instanced geometry use vrayproxies. try to garbage collect your scene to free up some memory.

[dbuchhofer]

this may sound silly, but Minimize max on occasion.. and minimize any other windows that you aren't using at the time.

Watch the memory as you do this.. its 'interesting'

also, save the model in wireframe, and open in wireframe, once you go to a shaded view, the viewport loads many bitmaps into ram for quicker display/panning. you can try a gc() or a freescenebitmaps() in the maxscript listener to 'release' some memory.

But, minimize.. go figure.

[j.galang]

this may sound silly, but Minimize max on occasion.. and minimize any other windows that you aren't using at the time.

Watch the memory as you do this.. its 'interesting'

also, save the model in wireframe, and open in wireframe, once you go to a shaded view, the viewport loads many bitmaps into ram for quicker display/panning. you can try a gc() or a freescenebitmaps() in the maxscript listener to 'release' some memory.

But, minimize.. go figure.

Yes i know this minimize thing, my physical memory usage does go down A LOT and it never hits the 1.5 GB mark but it still crashes, why you say? There is this option i saw that you can actually display not only the physical memory in the task manager, but also the Virtual memory. Now when you minimize max, the physical memory goes down to about 300,000 from 1,100,000 BUT the virtual memory still remains pretty high and when that passes 1,623,837 something, you crash (even if physical memory is only at like 700,000 something).


JG

[mike.edel]

this may sound silly, but Minimize max on occasion.. and minimize any other windows that you aren't using at the time.

Watch the memory as you do this.. its 'interesting'

also, save the model in wireframe, and open in wireframe, once you go to a shaded view, the viewport loads many bitmaps into ram for quicker display/panning. you can try a gc() or a freescenebitmaps() in the maxscript listener to 'release' some memory.

But, minimize.. go figure.

the usage has to do with the texture size you set up in the preferences/viewports/configure driver dialog under download texture size

max seems to convert all displayed textures to this size and keeps them in memory - 512 size is 768kb per texture...
so if you show 100 textures, you get 75mb ram usage at least (seem the actual mem size is even more)
the only thing that helped for me is to turn off the textures i dont need
(try a search for smiv on scriptspot for a handy script to do this)

in one scene max was using over 600mb for textures alone

of course this doesnt help you when rendering - max has to load all texture at that point...
for me the vray dynamic memory mode worked quite well

mike

[vlado]

Look at the troubleshooting section in the Help index, it has some tips on reducing memory usage while rendering.

Best regards,
Vlado

[ziddemizard]

Render in red....backburner...inmediatly you close Max... free memory for render

PD: excuseme, my english is very bad.

[j.galang]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I was finally able to render it with everything on (almost) and i had to collapse a lot of stacks and combined some individual meshes into one mesh. I also used xrefs to somewhat help (i heard somewhere it helps) conserve memory. I also lowered the raytrace parameters a bit in the systems rollout. Although I am at the very limit (1,463,276 by the sime the static tree finishes building) when rendering, i still get butterflies in my stomach watching the RAM usage go up.

A question for vlado, i read in the help files that UVW modifier consumes a lot of memory. I have a lot of geometry having 2 map channels, sometimes even 4 channels for making complex texture patterns within patterns. Also used them for making the texture look more random. So the question is, if I collapse the stack, i sort of still retain the same result as with an uncollapsed stack 9final redered image). Of course i cannot edit anymore the geometry and mapping. Will doing this conserve me memory? Or does MAX still imbed the multiple map channels with the geometry even if i collapse the stack to a mesh (i hope this makes some sense). Thanks again.

JG