[kashak]

by the way ... is it an MSI 845G ? i used to have one of those. it had 3 memory slots, too.

Did it work for you?
I will check what motherboard I have after moment, than leave a reply.

[Frankie V]

Well just based on the wires of your scene I don’t see anything that screams that you have exceeded the limitations of the memory requirements. For that matter I don’t think your even close to have to worry about scene management for the time being.

There are many reasons why a memory error could occur besides having to much in the scene at one time and from personal experience on my past machines as well as seeing the works of others and being familiar with their scene density the environment can handle a lot of assets and you would want to manage the scene not because of physical memory limitations but to keep the edit flow going.

The number one reason why you would want to increase you physical memory is to maintain the edit flow of the scene so your not slowed down by having the calculations spooled off to the hard drive through the virtual drive management system of the operating system.

I can say with certainty that it takes a lot to bring 3ds Max to its knees and the only thing that is frustrating with a dated machine is just the time it takes to do anything advance based on the resources that are available.

Adding more memory is always a good option as your adding more resources to the pool which 3ds Max will take advantage of but it may or may not solve the problem as its error dialogues are only a indication of a problem yet does not tell you where the error originated.

An example of a possible problem is the nul object. A nul object is one that is identified by the software as being a legitimate object yet contains no geometry. Easy to create one by detaching faces to objects at the sub object level up to the point where the last few elements are detached leave the original object with out geometric information.

Even though it contains no information it’s still being calculated as a valid object and could exceed the memory allowance assigned to such objects.

The first assumption when 3ds Max generates an error, and you not attempting something above and beyond the abilities of 3ds Max, is something in the scene is causing the problem and you should validate your scene to make sure that something has not been included above the norm.

The first step is to reset you scene and then merge each part in one at a time and test the behavior to see at what point it crashes, if it does at all as sometimes a wrong setting can cause strange things to happen as a feature and not as a bug.

Next check you virtual drive system and check let Windows manage the page swapping for you.

In general though just be aware that just because an error does pop up it’s usually general in nature as to what has occurred and a memory error is more like a brain fart than it is about running out of physical or even virtual memory.

[dobe]

Honestly, I think the cost of doing this is going to far outweigh the benefits that you'll be seeing.

[kashak]

Well just based on the wires of your scene I don’t see anything that screams that you have exceeded the limitations of the memory requirements. For that matter I don’t think your even close to have to worry about scene management for the time being.

I didn't expected anything like such response. I know scenes without animation or heavy rig even on such old machine could go like million of polys. But scene with foliage and something like more than 30 biped creatures animation approx.for 700 frames totaly counting 350000+ polys, I thought this is it, that's where my machine must stop.
Hhhhmmmmm, it's strange and good feeling at same time if that's the case that it can hold more. It's just that I really never asked myself - how far for example I can go with this computer? I mean some scene with characters,rigs and animation stuff going on and not just copy-pasting like millions of teapots until max goes mad

Adding more memory is always a good option as your adding more resources to the pool which 3ds Max will take advantage of but it may or may not solve the problem as its error dialogues are only a indication of a problem yet does not tell you where the error originated.

While totally agreeing with that being no solution to errors, one moment not quite clear. Previous Google research on this 3GB RAM issue showed me that adding so called 3GB switch is essential in terms of solving this "Out of memory" issue on 32-bit system. Like Windows has integrated into it some sort of hidden memory management that makes possible only 2GB of virtual memory accessible to programs if that switch isn't present and there's a reason for that. And this switch just makes it possible to allocate 3GB of virtual memory (out of 4GB of maximum virtual memory)for example to max "with a help of force" and that could speed, or I should say, stable-up things in max. By the way, I use 3ds max 2008.
If I leave that "3GB switch" aside because of possible risks, than physical 3GB is "all I have". I do know not much about how max manages RAM, it's mystical as you said. What max will do in situation when I have ,for example, the 2GB or 3GB RAM, whatever,
and leave in MR renderer Processing settings > Translator rollout > Memory Limit default value which is 650MB? Does that mean max will ignore rest of available memory while rendering?

But your reply, Frankie, does makes a point to me. I should be more aware of max's running out of memory errors not immediate relation memory really being ran out.
Your mentioned null object situation, or as I have heard it as scene corruption, looks like I'll check all things in that context. Aaaaaarrrrrrgghhhhh, with all my mess in scene files, I start to feel tired only imagining a procedure of seeking that "corrupted geometry" through many scenes that holds all neccesary geometry for intro scene as whole. Aaahh, whatever. Looks like I'm into it - it's time to have some fan and get frustrated!

ext check you virtual drive system and check let Windows manage the page swapping for you

That encouraged me to check what is going on with virtual system overally. I discovered that, by whatever reasons I did it long time ago, but I have dedicated virtual space to both of my drives C: and D: and it's set to maximum 4096MB to both. Is that healthy? It should be on only one, prefferably C drive?

In general though just be aware that just because an error does pop up it’s usually general in nature as to what has occurred and a memory error is more like a brain fart than it is about running out of physical or even virtual memory

With that kind of formulation I will easily remember this advice

[Frankie V]

Well 30 CS biped characters with 700 frames is more of a waste of resources than it is about worrying about memory. Total scene count of 350,000 polys I don’t see being that much of a problem to handle either. At one time I had more or less the same configuration that you have now and the only difference that I can say with 100% certainty the only thing that was rather limiting was how fast I could produce a usable asset.

See I have one rule and one rule only when it comes to CG producion.

Whatever it takes to get the render.

See once you have the render everything else becomes disposable. The result looks the way I want then I delete the asset folder as the drive space becomes more important than saving the element needed to create the result.

I found that if you stick to what others consider best practice, “the right way to do things”, in most cases you will find that those ideals are built with the assumption that everyone is working with the best of the best equipment and software when in fact you can gain the same results by taking a different work flow path.

In your case for example you have 30 CS biped characters walking around. Depending of the action that you need you could export the motion data using the point cache modifier as single frame elements for either each of the characters that you have or if all your characters are based on the same animation a single package that can be applied to all of the characters and the timing changed to avoid mirrored animation.

Once applied to a single character you can then delete the skin modifier as well as the biped character along with all of the key frames that goes with it. This way the computer only needs to load in the single frame animation and using 700 frames as the base you are in essence using 1/700th the resources that you were using before with the same file.

The other option of course is to use 3ds Max to gather the necessary elements that you need for the shot and composite the shots using either After Effects and in some cases a video editor. Going this route you could literally have thousands of characters in you scene all doing something different that could not do directly inside of 3ds Max.

The only difference between what you can do now and what you see on the big screen is nothing more than a factor of time in that what might take a studio a day to do may take you a week or even a month to achieve the same render goal.

[kashak]

Whhhooouuu, I have to consider that reply more carefully.
Because of my lack of knowledge of all those Xrefs and Point Caches I missed something really useful. I think I will start to search for tutorials and give it a go. In my scene many bipeds do share the same animation between them with different timing. To add individualistic properties to almost each I also heavily used Motion Mixer and mixed with variety. This Motion Mixer, that's where my max crashes the most. I became quite comfort with this tool and found it useful but can't leave a feeling it's very buggy. Never can't be sure that touching, sliding, editing this or that piece of bip animation won't cause a crash. By the way, I do not have any of SP installed for max2008. Sorry for me being rude and straight but I don't believe in Autodesk's Service Packs for max. I leave a possibility of me being wrong on that though.

Okay, to summarize this 3GB topic I made up my mind taking into account all replies I got. Now I format everything on that old computer completely and just add 3rd GB to it but I won't mess with any of 3GB switch. After your, Frankie, replies I convinced myself that I better look for improving my way of working and learn to be more efficient than worry about those gigabytes for now.

The only difference between what you can do now and what you see on the big screen is nothing more than a factor of time in that what might take a studio a day to do may take you a week or even a month to achieve the same render goal.

Inspiring words for "one-man studios" and enthusiasts like me.

[wwSwimming]

Originally Posted by kashak

Did it work for you?
I will check what motherboard I have after moment, than leave a reply.

it worked good for a while. i bought 2 of them in 2002/2003.

the first one i bought wearing my wetsuit. i had just chickened out on an ocean dive because i felt VERY scared while i was swimming. i ended up driving to the computer store instead.

i later on found out that a lobster fisherman saw a great white feeding in the same area, about 3 days before. i had never aborted a dive before.