Hi
I’m preparing a visualisation for the proposed extention of Roe Hwy in Perth.
Its a very large scene but has been rendering ok with quite a bit of detail included up until I tried to add some signs.
The signs by themselves render but as soon as I add a small jpg or gif sign face it crashes on rendering. The images are small around 15 to 80kb. Just one sign face will crash Max.
I’ve added signs to scenes in the past with no problems.
Any ideas on what could cause this?
I’m running 64bit Windows7 VSP4 in 3dsMax design 2010 with 16g ram.

Regards

Not easy to pinpoint without seeing the max file. Does this only happen in this scene, or can you reproduce it in other projects? What about if you remove some of the content from the scene, or remove any large bitmaps such as draped ortho photos.

Yes they work if I reduce the scene size.
The scene is 7km long by 2km wide and I found that I could not get a single bitmap to drape so I ended up draping the arial photo as two separate bit maps on different channels.
Unfortunatelly there is a lot of detail required including trees and buildings.
I’m using Itoo forrest pro for the trees. Seems funny that one sign face will push it over the edge.
I guess the answer is to break the scene into 2 or 3 sections?

...or you could buy more RAM and try to use proxies whenever it is possible.

It does sound like a memory related issue, but I can’t add much more than that. Splitting the scene would certainly help though.

Bruce Harfield - 06 April 2011 06:59 PM

Splitting the scene would certainly help though.

Just on that, do people not split scenes and XRef them in?  I couldn’t bear to work with singular massive scenes.  I’ve been burnt by instability* over the years which can cause scenes to corrupt as well as not enjoying scenes that are too large.

* one example is that our corporate screensaver crashes any open 3ds Max sessions and on occasion, a scene that is open has been corrupted.

Peter

Sometimes managing all those xref’s is more challenging then splitting the scene .

You reckon?  Each to their own but the only issue I have ever had with references is when I’m trying to populate vehicles and it just gets too big.  I have found managing XRef’s which represent the various elements of a scene a breeze.