Yes, we have a potential job in which we need to be able to render a massive number of particles, ideally millions. And we wish to do this with Particle Flow and of course, VRay.
We are hitting memory restrictions at several hundred thousand. And we are using the bare minimum geometry - 4 sided squares.
Our systems are 1 gig ram, others 512.
Instancing seems to be able to render them faster, but doesn’t seem to be any lighter on memory.
My question is: Can Vray be optimized to do this? Are there settings I’m unaware of that can help us do this? Also, would the new build capable of rendering unlimited polygons be helpful here? We use MAX 6 and I understand it is currently only for MAX 5 so that would be a problem.
Vlado, what are your thoughts on this issue? Surely millions of particles are required for film work so I assume it must be possible.
Any info would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
-Richard
Hi,
I don’t know if you are aware of the /3GB option, in the boot.ini (c: root generally). It helps 3dsmax, on win2k server and XP pro systems (Only), to adress more memory (actually, something around 2.85gb. Else 1.85gb).
Those numbers are independant to your RAM + swapfile size. With that amount, the ceillar is higher. It won’t help you much for xmillions I guess.
Anyways, I don’t know either if the internal build can page particles on disk. The paging system works with geometry, as far as I know.
In fact, I do not know nothing. 
i had to deal with this once, (waterfalls on a 1920x1080 animation) - my only solution was to render each particle system as a seperate pass (i had to have them in seperate max files even)…dunno if this will work for you though
I point you to the official /3GB Thread 
I think it should solve some of your Problems.
Thank you, guys, I will check out this 3GIG issue.
-Richard
Please inform us if you found a workaround