how to stop vray from preloading maps of hidden objects?

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max Issues
1

hello,

i think i said all in the title.if i have the objects hidden, the ram goes up massively if i hit render.
if i delete these 10 hidden object (3d men geometry with massive maps) the ram stays down.

btw…“render hidden geometry” is off

bug of 3.40.02?

thanks
thomes

2

rmc quad menu, “convert bitmaps to vray hdri”, do not touch a thing and press ok.
Sorted.

3

thanks lele,
don´t let me dye dumb…why do the maps load after all? in a small scene i was not able to confirm this, the maps did not seem to load when the objects were hidden.so why with this scene…
and, what does the workaround with hdri-texmap do?

thanks again for explaining me…

btw. tried it right now while writing and it did not work…while converting to hdri-texmaps, the ram exploded…

thomes

4

Ahah, sorry for the curt reply! :stuck_out_tongue:

VrayHDRI loaders load bitmaps on request, as a ray hits anything which has said bitmaps attached to it in a fashion or the other.
This, with standard bimap types, means that when the time comes to load the bitmap, it all gets loaded at once in RAM.

If you converted your original bitmaps to tiled EXRs (i would suggest using the standalone tool in the v-ray install dir. at its defaults.), then the same as above would happen, with one key difference: the right size mip-maps only will be loaded (say you have a 4k texture which is flat on a very far away plane, and covers only 10 pixels on screen: v-ray will load the 8 and 16 pixels mip-maps, and blend between those two, your 4k texture never fully loaded from disk), and of those, only the relevant buckets (the size of which is set at conversion time) will be taken into account (so you end up loading at most 64x64 pixel chunks at once, of the original textures, if you used the converter’s defaults.).

All this is ruled by two parameters in the render panel, “Settings” tab, under “Texture Settings”: the cache size determines how much ram can be used for textures before the ones not needed have to be swapped out to make room for new ones, which -especially with tiled EXRs- is a very powerful tool to get any amount of textures through the door very efficiently on pretty much any hardware, and the convenient checkbox “Clear cache on render end”, which you may want disabled if you keep iterating on the same subject (Lookdev, f.e.), but you may want on if you’re starved with RAM in between the render session and the max UI session, so that as the renderr finishes, that texture RAM is reclaimed (at the cost of having to reload the textures at the next render.)

5

thanks for the good explanation lele,

but why do my standard bitmaps get loaded when starting the render, even when the objects are hidden from the beginning of loading the maxfile?

6

A heritage from oooooold Max times, something AD ought to fix on its side (hence the birth of the vrayhdri and its subsequent use above and beyond the original scope of loading HDR files: we can then implement our own strategies.).