How do they do it?! (Memory question)

[PooLatka]

How do the big development houses render out their movies?!?!

I have 4 gigs of ram, and I'm trying to render out a huge picture of a complex scene.

How can i optimize max and my memory usage with it to let me render it out?

How does the Bitmap Pager work?

[Freespace-3DT]

How do the big development houses render out their movies?!?!
Layers, man. It's all about the layers and how to composite them in post-processing.

You have for example a scene with lots of buildings and characters. You have to separate layers by distance, render out each of them separately and mix them back together in something like Combustion or After Effects.

I haven't passed the 4 million poly limit too often ( that's where my PC starts to yell in agony and pain ), but when I do, I just render in passes.

[PooLatka]

ok, well, i got 4 gigs of ram, an x1900xtx, intel core 2 duo 6600, and I'm having memory problems up the ass with this one scene. Its only 1.2 mil polys, maybe only 4-2048 maps I'm using as alpha channels, and the rest are all just shades of grey with global illumination.

At one point, i saved my main work file, and when i tried to reopen it, memory error. luckily every piece i build in max i build in a seperate max file than merge it, so i was able to quickly rebuild my scene. problem now, is that when i try to render out of mental ray, it won't... memory error. and then when i render out of scanline with light tracer, no go... and if i just render out of scanline, it'll work with 3 omni's casting shadows... an no more..... then i just get memory errors.

I've messed with my page file, i've turned it off, and then increased it by a gig until i got up to 6 gigs of a pagefile (on a WD Raptor, 15k rpm), and decided that it was ridiculous to have a 6 gig pages file with 4 gigs of ram, and something else is obviously the problem.

I tried every little thing i could think of that related to memory. I cleared my temps, my prefetch, reseated the memory (just in case, lol). It's driving me nuts.

Naturally, the pressures of freelance deadlines are getting to me.
any suggestions, greatly appreciated.

[Freespace-3DT]

Then it doesn't make any sense. I've got a weaker system than you, and 1.2 mil polys never gives me trouble ( with 2 GB of RAM and a 2 GB pagefile ).

How long since you reinstalled your windows? Checked for viruses recently? Maybe you have some conflicting plug-ins?

One possible solution would be to collapse ALL your objects down to editable polys, it really eases 3dsmax's wheels. I do it all the time.

Try rendering a meshsmoothed sphere ( up to 3-4 mil polys ) in Mental Ray, see if that works, to test your PC's capacity for polygons.

[inveni0]

Call Autodesk for support.
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hehehe


To answer your original questions, big companies use render farms. They spread the work out amongst large servers. You can really build nice webs with these, boosting ram and everything (sometimes up to 64GB of ram will exist in a single case).

[Fredddy]

If your using Windows XP, then it maybe that your 4gigs of ram are causing an issue.
Something to do with physical address space (all a bit beyond me).
But if you google 'windows xp PAE' or 'physical address extention' you should get some
interesting reading.
My machine had 4gigs of ram and mental ray would crash if it used any more than 1250megs.
I swapped 2x 1gig for 2x 512meg leaving me with 3gigs total and mostly its working a lot better.

[--Strattus--]

In fact, there is an OS memory adressing limitation going on there...
Windows XP x86 (32 bit) limits the maximum memory an application can use, no matter what the circumstances or the current available memmory, it will always be 4GB, equally divided between Kernel and application usage, which has only 2GB to share across the whole of processes you have opened.
In the end, 3dsmax will have something about 300 - 1GB MAX of memory available to use. That's probaly why it is crashing, or at least it would be my guess.
To solve this problem, either upgrade to Windows Vista, which can adress much more memory, or at least use Windows x64, which solves the problem partially.