What eats up the ram more?

[k-arts]

Just curious about the the ram usage on max-files? Are the settings of vray more important or the poly amount of my model to save precious amount of ram? I know both eat up lots of ram if set or build with excessive use of numbers

thx in advance


ralf

[YoyoBoy]

Usually bitmap textures are the biggest RAM killer, though procedural materials tax the processor a lot more. Geometry is the second culprit.

[DaForce]

Displacement is a killer as well.

[RErender]

adaptive sub AA can be a killer too, adaptive qmc is much lighter.

[Infrared digital]

Opacity maps - especially if your trees leaves are opacity mapped.

[DaForce]

Opacity maps - especially if your trees leaves are opacity mapped.

The render penalty for using opactiy mapped leaves..etc.. can be greatly reduced by turning the filtering in the bitmap properties for the opactiy map to OFF

[Infrared digital]

Would that cause a more aliased result or flickering when animated ?

[DaForce]

Nope. Not that I have noticed.

[HMA_Steve]

out of interest, when you say bitmap textures are the biggest RAM killer, what the best way to reduce this? will using more aggressive compression in a jpeg help or does it work the same ways real-time 3d does whereby the its the physical pixel size that makes the difference not the file size and does keeping pixel sizes to a power of 2 ie 512x512 or 1028x1028 etc.. have any effect of ram usage?

[percydaman]

from what I've heard, max will make your image into a power of 2 memory wise. So your better off using that to your advantage.

[DaForce]

More compression on a JPG will make zero difference. The only difference will be obtained from a smaller resolution OR using an image format that uses indexed color such as GIF

[Da_elf]

your serious? i always thought the power of two thing was a myth

[percydaman]

i swear i read that somewheres. I wish I remembered where though. I believe max only supports power of 2 textures so it converts it at rendertime. I always hoped I was wrong on that though.

[jacksc02]

uncompressed image formats are lighter on memory than heavily compressed ones.

[DaForce]

Vray AFAIK reads in the image/texture pixel by pixel so image compression should not make any difference.