Out of memory when rendering in 3ds Max?

Ghostscape

Whenever I run Mental Ray to RTT an Amb Occ or normal map, I'm getting "unable to allocate memory" errors mental ray crashes.

I tried to work around this by rendering a skylight in the scanline renderer, but its telling me it doesn't have enough memory to build the lighting information.

I have 2 gigs of RAM and about 6 gigs free on my hard drive. I suspect that I have some setting missing somewhere that will let it take full advantage of the page file on my hard drive.

I'm using the 9 demo at the moment so it's using factory settings for the most part.

Any suggestions?

Neo_God

There might be a memory leak somewhere in your comp. Or you're running a shit load of programs n' processes while your trying this.

Ghostscape

Well I had been trying to render out a 2048x2048 amb occ map, 2048x2048 normal map, and 2048x2048 diffuse map, and it was giving me the out of memory issue.

Rendering just a 512x512 amb occ makes it render just fine...except I'm rendering a 512x512 map instead of one that's useful

Isn't there a memory paging thing you need to turn on somewher? I seem to recall turning it on before when I was trying to render a complex scene to 6400x2400, but I can't remember where it is.

Time to go rooting through the configs I guess

edit: Except rendering a 1024x1024 amb occ fails while trying to allocate the same amount of memory as the 2048s. What the fuck.

Jarrod1937

what do you have your max and min page file setting set to? just because you have 6 gigs free hard drive space doesn't mean your computer is made to use those 6 gigs.

Ghostscape

Windows is set to manage it automatically.

Jarrod1937

well, manually set your page file to both be 4096x4096 max and min (or higher if need be). setting them both equal in max and min keeps windows from having to adjust the page file while its needed (reduces performance a lot while it does this).
having windows do the page file automatically is bad because it will be low untill you need a large amount fo page file, then windows trys to increase it, but your program might have already given up because windows wasn't fast enough. not to mention the fact that while you need a larger page file your perfomance is being degraded further by having windows resize it at the same time.
so just set them manually equal max and min, although if you only have 6 gigs total left on the hard drive i owuld not ste your page file to 6 gigs unless you free up some hard drive space.