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Memory Consumption In 3ds max / VIZ

Introduction

Chris Landry, of Landry and Lewis Architects in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, offered a tip on how he deals with memory issues. He experienced the purple squares and disappearing RPCs, when creating his animations, and began searching for a solution to reduce memory consumption. Chris found that objects in his scene that contained several modifiers tended to “eat” large amounts of memory. He discovered that by collapsing the modifier stack for all of the objects, in his scene, he could easily eliminate the memory issue and improve render times. Since discovering this trick and subsequently freeing up substantial amounts of memory, Chris reports that he has not experienced any difficulty with his RPCs.

Note: Collapsing the modifier stack will greatly reduce the amount of memory required to render your scene, and reduce render time. However, you will lose many of your undo options, so you will want to save a copy of your scene before proceeding.

Here are the steps Chris used to eliminate his memory issues:

1. Select all of the Geometry in the scene except for the RPCs. This can be performed by opening the Selection floater by pressing the shortcut key H. Select only the geometry in the scene by toggling off everyting in the scene under the List Types option except Geometry. Use the Invert option to refine the list to not include RPCs. You can do this by highlighting the RPCs then choosing Invert and clicking on Select.

2. With all of the geometry selected, apply the Edit Mesh modifier.

3. Next, right click in the modifier window and select Collapse All.

4. A warning message will appear notifying you that everything in the stack will be removed. Click on Yes to continue.

The scene should now render faster and the memory issue is less likely to occur. I hope that you have found this tip to be useful. ArchVision thanks Chris for his useful tip. If you have any tips that you would like to share, please send them to support@archvision.com. Until next time, happy rendering to you!