Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Smith
I recently mentioned this tip in a class and based on the fact that no one knew it, I thought it would be worthwhile here. If you are rendering a very large scene and are getting close to running out of RAM, here's a way that will save you a few hundred extra MBs from being consumed without slowing down rendering at all like other procedures (such as rendering in dynamic mode or with proxies).
Simply save the scene in wireframe mode with one maximized viewport and reload the scene. As soon as you change to Smooth+Highlights mode, you should see a lot of RAM consumed, with more being consumed for larger scenes. If you switch to Smooth+Highlights mode before you render, you are basically giving away that RAM, and there is no way to get it back. But if you just load a scene and immediately render without going into Smooth+Highlights first, you will have all that extra RAM to render with. Open your Task Manager and monitor your RAM consumption to verify. The larger the scene, the more RAM you save. Roughly speaking, you should expect to see a savings of 100MB for every 1million polygons your scene contains.
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close the material editor also, as those bitmaps also get loaded into ram at startup/open.
another way without reopening max to do roughly the same thing is to:
Code:
in the little pink maxscript bar at the bottom left hand corner type:
freescenebitmaps()
hit enter
gc()
hit enter again
minimize max
maximize max
:)
Also be aware that the real memory ram usage number you're looking for isn't visible by default in the task manager, if go to View, Select Columns, and look for VM Size. thats the combined RAM+Virtual memory. if you're in max 32bit, and that number hits 1,700,000 roughly, you can kiss max goodbye
slowly thats becoming less of an issue with 64bit, but not everyone has taken that plunge.