Reduce Memory Usage To Render high memory [Archive]

rebolt

05-11-2006, 03:29 PM

Reducing Memory Usage To Render A Memory Hungry Scene By Neil Blevins: Here are a few tips to help you render a really large scene, or to
render a really large bitmap of your scene in 3dstudio max. It's quite
common to work on a scene for quite some time, doing 640x480 test
renders, and then reaching a point where you want to render the scene
at 2048 pixels or higher. You hit render, and bam, you get the out of
memory error, and max crashes. Here's a few things to try. 

1) Close all other applications. Seems
obvious, but it's surprising how much RAM other small applications can
take up. For example, iTunes seems to gobble up about 0.1 of a Gig of
RAM, even though common sense seems to suggest it wouldn't take up too
much memory. 

2) Turn off the vfb and render to file.
The "Virtual Frame Buffer" (vfb) which is now called the "Rendered
Frame Window" takes up a lot of memory. So for the privilege of seeing
a preview of your render, you're giving up potentially 200 to 300 meg
of RAM, especially if you're rendering a 2k or 3k image. Go to the
renderer options and uncheck the Rendered Frame Window Checkbox. If
using a 3rd party renderer like Brazil, make sure you turn off it's
frame buffer as well. Then set the renderer to save the result as a
file in the Render Output section. This will save you tons of RAM. 

3) Do a netrender. Even for still frames,
even if you only have one computer, using backburner or a different
netrenderer can save tons of RAM, because it doesn't need to fully load
max to render your scene. So I usually set up my home computer as both
the manager and the server, I go into max, I set off a netrender,
making sure I have the "Initially Suspended" checkbox checked, then
close max, then go into the Monitor and initialize the job (if you
forget to submit the job uninitialized, your computer will try and load
2 copies of the scene, one in the netrender, and the copy of the scene
that's already open in max, and that's a very bad thing). Check the
manual for more info on using backburner, or whatever network renderer
you choose. 

4) Command Line Rendering. You can also
use commandline rendering to render your file. Just look up Command
Line Rendering in the help file. 

5) Turn off bitmaps displayed in the
viewport. This doesn't reduce memory for a netrender, but if you want
to do an interactive render inside max, it's quite possible that a
bunch of your memory is being eaten up displaying maps in your scene in
the viewport (I was surprised the other day when I found out about half
a GIG of RAM was being used up displaying a bunch of large maps in the
viewport). Just go to the Views Menu and click on the "Deactivate All
Maps" option. 

Hopefully some of these tips will help you render those hard to render
scenes. Thanks