Memory issue solved
After going through all the materials used in the most recent file that I thought was corrupt and altering them to either 1024² or 2048² as appropriate; the scene renders like a dream. It looks like buying the additional RAM was still a good idea, but at least the file actually renders instead of crashing out.
Lesson learnt.
64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE READY…
4Gb of RAM is on its way to me right now. No more running out of memory with Mental Ray or complete closures of 3D Max.
(Well, we’ll see.)
Maxed out on memory
I’ve been fighting with 2GB of RAM getting this scene to render. I’ve figured out that I had a lot of rubbish running in the background and I can render at the moment but it feels like this laptop is on borrowed time.
My laptop is on a pair of cooling fans too. I’ve not noticed any difference when using max.
Heading towards 5% sky, at least at this angle. I’m trying to add interesting bits to the scene to. It seems to be working. I’ve quite impressed myself. This is 5-6 hours work from the previous stage to this. Thats having ignored the three hours of work this morning where the central building was built using using Extrude and Bevel and I ended up with the top of the building with inverted Normals !! How I have no idea! but I was watching time go by with frustration so I deleted it and approached the build in separate layers rather than as one whole poly.
Lets get normal in here!
Lesson of the day: Normals only need to face the camera, period! No need for duplicating sides of corrugated roofing unless animation is involved and there is a distinct chance that the reverse of the normal object may be seen.
Its not that I didn’t know this, its just one of the things that doesn’t get thought of a lot and sits with the others on the back burner.
The current position of the model is interesting in an abstract kind of way.
