rendering large scenes is certainly do-able as others have noted. We print large format here and render all our “single” frame images at 7000x3500 pixels.
There’s been a bit of heartache (and a whole lot of reading in the forums) to get to where we can do it repeatedly in production but it does work.
We have had to use most of the suggestions others have pointed to above.
i.e.
>3gb ram switch. we use this on 30 workstations/slaves. Makes a big difference!
>Vray proxy. For us, tile roofs and cars push our scenes to 2-4 million polys. The only way we can render at 7000 pixels is by using them.
>Strip rendering. Typically 50 or so strips, try to keep each strip around 60 pixels
This isn’t to say we still don’t have issues. We recently introduced speed tree in to our process and it’s giving us fits. Vlado and others in the forums have been extreemly helpful in working through the problems with us. We have an animation we are working on with 1000’s of trees and every machine except 1 is getting the unexpected exception error. I’m pretty confident it’s a memory issue as the one computer that works has 6gigs of ram and running Win64. Point being is that since this is beta, I expect there to be problems and I try to allow additional time when we introduce something new to our process that we haven’t done before.
Hang in there, there are frustrating moments but it’s definetely worth it.
rendering large scenes is certainly do-able as others have noted. We print large format here and render all our “single” frame images at 7000x3500 pixels.
There’s been a bit of heartache (and a whole lot of reading in the forums) to get to where we can do it repeatedly in production but it does work.
We have had to use most of the suggestions others have pointed to above.
i.e.
>3gb ram switch. we use this on 30 workstations/slaves. Makes a big difference!
>Vray proxy. For us, tile roofs and cars push our scenes to 2-4 million polys. The only way we can render at 7000 pixels is by using them.
>Strip rendering. Typically 50 or so strips, try to keep each strip around 60 pixels
This isn’t to say we still don’t have issues. We recently introduced speed tree in to our process and it’s giving us fits. Vlado and others in the forums have been extreemly helpful in working through the problems with us. We have an animation we are working on with 1000’s of trees and every machine except 1 is getting the unexpected exception error. I’m pretty confident it’s a memory issue as the one computer that works has 6gigs of ram and running Win64. Point being is that since this is beta, I expect there to be problems and I try to allow additional time when we introduce something new to our process that we haven’t done before.
Hang in there, there are frustrating moments but it’s definetely worth it.
As far as trying the 3GB switch, there is for the most part no risk as long as you have to entries in the boot.ini 1 with the /3GB and one without it, that way you will always be able to boot by using the non 3GB option.
I’ve added the 3GB switch to one of our nodes and it booted - good! No problem there like you said rerender. What I now need to know is do I adjust the virtual memory in windows? At the minute it is sitting at 2046mb…should this be at 3gb or more now? It says I can use 4096mb?
Just sent a test render to see what happens, but hopefully someone can clarify this final problem. I’m sure it’ll allow the scene to render…I hope
Hmm, I’m clearly missing something. I managed to get this 3GB switch thing working, but I don’t know if I have to change the virtual memory settings in windows to allow more memory to be paged? I knocked it up to 4gb…that was probably dumb, becuase it doesn’t render for half as long now. But I’m sooo confused! I read in an earlier post to put the dynamic memory limit up to 4096mb or a 4GB…is that counting both my physical ram (2gb) and then another 2gb of paged memory?
The virtual memory settings in windows were at 2046 mb (or thereabouts)…should I leave those at that?
Interesting. I’ll try that also. I’m using vrays VFB but how do I turn off maxes? Does it turn off automatically if you use the vray one?
To save memory while rendering you do the following:
Max always creates its framebuffer no matter what, even if it doesn’t display it. This of course wastes a lot of memory in addition to the VRay frame buffer if you are rendering large images. So set the rendering size in the Common Parameters rollout of the Common tab to something tiny, like 20×20 pixels. This will use very litte memory.
Now scroll down to the bottom of this rollout and uncheck Rendered Frame Window. You have now disabled the max virtual frambuffer as much as possible.
Switch to the Renderer tab, and open the VRay:: Frame buffer rollout.
Check Enable built-in Frame Buffer
Since you probably want to render more than 20×20 pixels uncheck Get resolution from MAX and set the output resolution you want.
Uncheck Render to memory frame buffer. This way you won’t use up all your memory to store the image while rendering is in progress.
Enable Render to V-Ray raw image file and set the filename/path you want.
You should now be able to render huge scenes (I’ve rendered close to 10k without problems).
When the rendering is finished you can use the View image file tool in 3ds max (file menu) to load the .vrimg file and save it as a tiff or tga or whatver you want.
changing from static to dynamic (in the system rollout in vray i think)worked for me but then I ran into a bug in max/viz which didnt allow images over 10000 pixels wide. I think this option was to enable bitmap paging in the viz/max settings somewhere…
I found I didnt need to set the dynamic memory limit too high. 1024 was enough for me to cut out crashes but for bigger jobs, best to go with other peoples suggestion of 4096.
basically, some issues are max/viz related so the first thing on your checklist should be to read the max/viz help if theres a chance that the problem isnt vray specific.
some notes about memory consumption/crashes with and without the 3GB switch.
- without the switch 3dsmax.exe is gonna crash when getting close to 1.5GB of memory on the process
- with the switch, it should be able to go up to 2.4 - 2.8 GB on the process, depending on how fragmented the memory is.
- on Opteron systems with windows64 beta people were able to allocate even more ram for the process (4GB+), what will be the biggest benefit we’ll get from the new technology imho, even before speed increases.
So basically what you can do:
- prepare your scene as egz stated
- set the geometry to static for the first try
- send the scene to a renderbox with the 3GB switch
- have the taskmanager opened on that box, watching the processes
- 3dsmax.exe will appear, as well as the render dialog
- watch ram consumtion, and doublecheck with the render dialog what vray is doing right now and how it affects the memory
- if 3dsmax.exe should hit the limit at about 2.5GB it will crash
- if it crashes you’ll first of all try the dynamic option
- leave the value at 400MB
- do as above stated and watch the task manager
- does max crash? if not, how much overhead in memory do you still have? if it starts rendering at 1.9GB for example and doesn’t go above,
you can most likely give another 300 - 400MB to the dynamic option, i.e. 800MB…
hope this helps a little, setting the dynamic option to 4096MB is imho not a good idea, because winXP32 can’t handle that much memory anyway, so it wont force vray to use less than 2.5gb…
there are sure other things you can do to optimize, but that’s a way to start.
I have enabled vray frame buffer and it renders normally except when i use DR, in that case Vray renders in small resolution 20x20 pix like other pc’s use maxframe buffer.
Thanks everyone for your input. I’ve managed to get 2 scenes rendered out. I’m going for the final and most complex one now and I’ll try everything I’ve read in here!
In the end I had to render the cutlery for a scene separately. The poly count for the plates and cutlery alone was 5 million! This sounded way to high.
I read someone mention using a vray proxy mesh? How does this work?
It’s best to check the help file for that. You need to select the objects, right click, create vray mesh and then import the vraymesh. It’s a bit tricky because materials are not transferred into the mesh.
Ah I see - so would it make sense to just do the modelling first and then create the vray mesh and then apply materials? I’ll have to do a bit of research myself.
The problem is if you export 100 objects in one go, it will be 1 vray mesh with 1 material. You can use multi sub object material before you export (so set all ID’s on the original model correctly) and apply the multi sub mat to the vraymesh afterwards.
Or export every object as a seperate vraymesh…
I don’t think it’s very well suited for objects with lot’s of materials. On a tree you could get away with a few mats so that’s not a lot of work.
Actually Ive had great success with creating vraymesh’s out of entire houses with around 20 textures each. I just convert all the objects to a editable mesh attach all to a single object and the multi/sub material is created for you so just save that to a new mat lib and reaply it to the proxy in the new scene
