Rendering High Poly Sculpts

Psy-UK

Hi there. I'm trying to make a brick wall using bricks sculpted in Mudbox, imported into 3DS Max, and instanced to create the actual wall. The problem I'm having is that the scanline renderer will cause everything on my computer to freeze up when I attempt to bake out a map. It's get so far and then the memory usage will surge up to over 2.5GB

Now, it seems pretty obvious why. Each brick is just over 250k polies each, so when I have lots of them all together the poly count starts to add up and...that's not good.

However I see see tutorials like this which don't mention anything about decimation yet it appears that the objects can be baked out fine.

So what would be the best thing to do? Decimate the brick down to a more manageable size or what?

EarthQuake

Decimate or get more ram =P

And of course, model a few variants, like 4-8 unique bricks, with unique detailing on each side, and then instance and rotate the instances for variation.

sprunghunt

I don't know what version of max you're using but here's some solutions that could work in max 2010:

1) In the rendering dialog box go to the "render setup" dialog, click on the "renderer" tab, then check the "conserve memory" checkbox. It's down the bottom.

2) Don't use the scanline renderer. Use mental ray instead. It sometimes is more efficient with ram usage and I've used it to render stuff that's crashed the scanline renderer.

Psy-UK

I applied an optimiser modifier and rendered with MR without a hitch. Danke all.