3DSmax : Animated Crowd killing my pc

capone

Just want to render a scene with 100-200 bipeds but max freezes for 10mins if I save or edit. I've tried x ref and containers but it still struggles. (I have a high quality pc, 10GB of ram etc) Not sure what else to do? Any ideas?

AlexCatMasterSupreme

10 gigs of ram isn't that much for a scene with probably that many polys.

monster

Are they biped skeleton or skinned characters?

If they are skinned characters you can point cache them and it will make things much faster.

capone

Skeleton. Shouldn't that make it even faster? They have no skin or extra mesh, it's just default bipeds.

capone

Just explored point cache but it doesn't work on bipeds without skin. Think I've tried everything now.

maximumsproductions

I don't really know much about your situation but isn't something like 100-200 animated characters you want to do in post. And if not hopefully this can be a bump for an answer

monster

200 skeletons would be worse than point cache. The transformation calculations on each bone is probably what is killing your machine.

That's why many cinematic houses use Houdini and destroy the rig, and use point caches to edit.

Try breaking up your scene into groups of 10/20. Them composite them together. You can use the batch render to spit them all out.

spacefrog

Do you have any posture collections in biped's Copy/Paste rollout ?
There was a bug in some Max versions filling this rollouts with copies and copies of postures. Might look if thats the case ( pretty hard on hundreds of bipeds ...), but there might be a cleaner script on scriptspot as far i remember
Another thing is motioncapture data, if you got large, unoptimized mocap files loaded on the bipeds this eats RAM too.

I just tested on my 8GB quadcore rig:
i can playback ~180 NONINSTANCED bipeds with motioncapture data on it ( some dance mocap from the shipping bip files ) with 3 fps . Saving happens in about 4 secs. I'm on Max 2013 lates update PU6 btw..

Whats you Max version ? what viewport settings ?