Urgent help

[reality3d]

Hi all,
Have just finally upgraded to max 9 in the office, and we are doing an external animation.
I am using irr map and light cache, I set the render off last night to do the light calculation, and the irr map for just 500 frames came back at 400meg. Is this normal for max 9??? it used to be about 50 meg max in max 8.
Problem is, that much loaded into memory, plus scene and textures is crashing some of the machines as they are running out of memory.

What is the best way round this? Also I am using rpc's so I have to calc the light without them on.

Thanks James

[DaForce]

Hey buddy

Well max8-max9 shouldnt make any difference with the way the IR is handled. Assuming your using the same version of vray. Post your renders settings so I can have a peek.

Also with RPC, just turn them invisible to GI that way you dont need to turn them off during the renders.

[reality3d]

Hey Daforce,
here are the settings I was using.... all fairly basic. I was doing every 5th frame.http://www.reality3d.com.au/temp/setting1.jpg
http://www.reality3d.com.au/temp/setting2.jpg

[reality3d]

yeah not sure what is going on, previously as an example for 1600 frames at every 5th frame the map size was 190meg, but this one was 482 meg for just 500 frames.

The only thing I can think of that is different to normal is we are using max 9 and a lot of buildings in the scene are proxies... not sure if that will make a difference.
Plus the buildings that are proxies have been modelled in archicad, so are fairly polygone heavy.

[DaForce]

Yeah your render settings seem pretty normal. Cant say it would be them thats causing the problem.

Is the crashing happening during the IR/LC calc or dring the render itself.

Are you rendering the IR map ever nth frame?

[reality3d]

yeah it's getting through the IR calc, but when you go to render, after loading in the IR map the file is like 2 gig, which crashes the systems.

[DaForce]

Weird.. hmm well I guess since you need to get it rendered.. try breaking it up in sections.. do say 5 smaller renders so that way the IR map will be smaller.
A pain in the ass sure.. but atleast it "should" render.

[reality3d]

lol yeah doing exactly that at the moment.

[DaForce]

haha snap

Let me know if your still having problems.

[Da_elf]

are you compairing the same scene done in max 8 then rendered in max 9 or are you compairing one type of scene done in max8 to another scene simular but done in max 9? the size of the irradiance map can vary alot from scene to scene. i also would calculate a map that is only a portion of the entire thing, like 1 irradiance map for frames 1-100 then another for 101-200 etc