Hi,
we have quite big crowd in USD done in Houdiny and I’m trying to render it but I have problems with RAM consumtion.
- shot is 70 frames long
- crowd contains skeletal animation of 8000 agents
- each one around 7,5k tris
- usd crowd is around 800MB for whole shot
- loaded trought native max USD Stage loader because I have to override some materials
RAM consumption is around 100GB which is big. Any idea how to optimize it? Does V-Ray even handle Max USD Stage properly?
Thanks
I forgot to add we used USD plugin 0.9.0.85 from max 2025 and lates V-Ray 7.1
Is the memory utilization similar when rendering in Houdini?
Cca 50GB in Karma and the “first pixel” time was much much faster. I also tried to load it via vray scene but it crashed.
Send the files so we can troubleshoot.
Sent, its 3 files so please use all of them
What’s your ticket number?
ah sorry its 390568
Is there a specific frame on which the RAM consumption is that high? I just loaded all three .USD files (via the 3ds Max USD Stage node), rendered frame 1012 (random) - it is slow to start and release, but seems to take 38 GB of memory at its peak (incl. 3ds Max). Tried rendering it through a VRayScene node too, and it seems to work fine, taking a similar amount of memory. I’m using USD 0.9.0.85, 3ds Max 2025 (no updates), and the latest official V-Ray 7.10.00. Am I missing something?
EDIT: What resolution are you rendering? I tested only with the default.
Hmm interesting, try to use this camera and frame 1043 please. Also please dont post any images of the usd content here.
This is my ram usage without any shader, remaining 40GB was propablu due to shading? Still to big I think.
I’m getting similar results with the imported camera and frame 1043.
Could you share the Memory tracking rollout of the Stats when you render with and without shaders?
Resolution doesn’t make a difference for the USD memory consumption, only for the VFB portion. Otherwise, you can save a few gigabytes of memory by exporting a .vrscene and rendering with Standalone - this will eliminate the host platform’s cut. The VFB seems to get a fair share, too - you can disable it for the final render.
Yeah but what about the USD why the performance is so poor compared to houdiny?
I reckon it’s because the USD format is native for Houdini and is probably more optimized than the DCC plugins. Arnold in 3ds Max seems to perform similarly, with around ~39 GB (on the scene I’m testing with) memory utilization. So it’s not a V-Ray thing per se.
Ok thanks for the research.
Quick question its possible to override materials in USD when its loaded trought Vray Scene object?
Sorry to say, it’s not possible.
Oh no, I feel like I fell into the trap with USD 
Alway something doesn’t work here and there. I have another here and propably its V-Ray related. USD stage object (Max) doesnt accept any properties like primary visibility or matte. Can you confirm that if its a bug? If I convert it to max object (USD 0.11) it works but then couple of other important things doesn’t work unfortunately.
I’m also gettiíng this error when using promote to max object .
- works ok on workstation
- fails everythime on Deadline with this error
Error: 3dsmax: Trapped SEH Exception in LoadFromFile(): Access Violation
Process: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2026\3dsmax.exe
Module: C:\WINDOWS\System32\KERNELBASE.dll
Date Modified: 06/11/2025
Exception Code: C0000005
Read Address: 00000000
Instruction: 0F 1F 44 00 00 48 8B 8C 24 C0 00 00 00 48 33 CC
Call Stack:
89C70000 C:\WINDOWS\System32\KERNELBASE.dll
+0003AF29 Exception Offset
4A920000 r:\repo\max_2026\vray7\plugins\max_usd\0.11.0\vren der_usd.dll
+008CEF80 (4B1EE9C0, 79, 8C2FEE4A, 7FFF, 4B1F2B40)
- it also fails when is rendered trought deadline on a machine used as worksation
- it happen only if objects promoted from usd stage are used in scene
Is there something I miss? Some environment variable or any dependency which is not properly passed to Deadline in our submiter?