Just noticed this in Max9 32bit. Is this fully supported with Vray, particularly when rendering with DR? We are using pretty high resolution textures these days, and I have always re-made the really high res ones (6-8000 pixels) to about 2500 pixels to prevent memory problems in Max. This is always a pain as it takes time and I feel we are losing out in some of the detail in these large textures.
It now looks like max9 will generate the proxies on the fly and commit them at rendertime only.
For Proxies, in your rendering dialog box you click on “setup” under bitmap proxies. Then you tell max to cut all maps by a certain amount (1/2, 1/4, 1/8 so on).
Then you tell it the MAXIUM pixel dimension of a map you wish it to create a proxy for.
Then when you click on generate proxies… it will create proxies for any map larger than that maxium pixel dimension, downsizing it by how much you told it to.
IT will save it into the proxy cache folder which is set using “customize → configure user paths → file I/O tab”
So then after you have max generate the proxies, in the proxy set up tab in the drop down box you tell max to render with proxies. That’s all there is too it. If you want to go back to the orginal maps.. simply turn proxies off.
So for example.. if you set the maximum pixel dimension to 1000 and told max to downscale maps by 1/2, if you have a map that is 999x999 pixels, Max won’t do anything with it. However if you have a map that is 1500x800 pixels.. it would downscale it to 750x400 and then use THAT proxy until you tell it not to. It will do that for every map in your scene.
If you are running out of memory it’s a very handy and quick way to downsize all your maps. Because often I will find out that I am useing a handful of 3mb + .jpg files as maps that I didn’t know they were that large, and they don’t need to be ANYWHERE near that size, and it’s enough to give me memory problems.
Now bitmap paging, I don’t understand quite as well. But it works similar. What you are doing is basically telling max during rendering to send maps larger than a certain size to a temporary page file instead of trying to keep them all in memory.
If that’s not right.. hopefully someone will correct me on that.
Bitmap pager: If texture file size (or is it memory footprint?) is greater than "Value in Dialog"KB, then it will be written out to a temporary swap file when not immediately needed in the scene to spare a little more physical ram.
think of it like the vray proxies it lets you abuse a few more bitmaps.
I believe the setting needs to be set on all of the farm machines also? it can be found in the 3dsmax.ini, if you can find that these days
Ok, so this works fine on the local workstation, but to get it working over back burner do you have to configure the 3dsmax.ini for all render machines?
We used to do this years ago for other plugin locations when using max 6 / 7 etc., but i genuinely cannot find the 3dsmax.ini file now. I’ve been looking for ages - anyone have any idea for Max 9?
So we’ll configure all the .ini files to point to the same bitmap proxie location as the workstation machine uses?
For 3ds Max 9 and above the 3dsmax.ini file is in the folder “c:\documents and settings\\Local settings\Application data\Autodesk\3dsmax\2008 - 32bit\enu”
The “2008 - 32bit” part depends on the 3ds Max version and bitness. The “enu” bit depends on the language of 3ds Max. The Local settings and Application data folders are hidden, so you need to make Explorer to show hidden files and folders first.
thanks Vlado - I’m massively trying to reduce the memory consumption of a scene, and this is looking to be a good option.
I know this is a 3dsMax issue now not a vray issue, but to get Bitmap proxies to work for network rendering with backburner do you have to configure this 3dsmax.ini file on all the rendering machines to point at the bitmap proxy location as per the local workstation?
Also, we’ve lowered the max tree depth & increased face/level coef. - are there any general rules for not dropping below or increasing over certain thresholds here? currently set to 50 & 2 respectively.
Actually, I think you must have to configure the .ini paths for this to work properly.
I’ve just done a DR High Res render over night, and found that one machine renders using the bitmap proxies (the host) and the slave renders with the high res images, so there is significant difference between buckets.
Not sure about backburner, but definitely not with DR unfortunately. (SP1)
out of interest if you want max to be old skool edit this line in InstallSettings.ini (from root of max) to:
useUserProfiles=0
I always install max from a bat file which after installing max and plugins also copies this plus edited plugin.ini and 3dsmax.ini into every installation of max (so simple plugins -ie ones which just require a .dl* to be mapped - can be easily loaded from one shared folder and evey machine has same custom defaults). Makes life a lot easier for me.
Still can’t file the bitmap proxies you guys are talking about! Man which version of Max?
Mine is Max 8.0. Is it bitmap proxies or bitmap pager? I did a search on the help and
it returns none!
Preference setting > Render Dialog > Bitmap Pager
ok I think I saw that vlado mention Bitmap Pager … there is no button on the common
tab that says “Bitmap Proxies” … squeakbadger you fooled me!
it lets you abuse a few more bitmaps.