Mental Ray out of memory?

[Snowy]

Hola
I hope this is the right section, since we don't have a "general modeling" forum... Anyway, I'm animating a scene with Mental Ray and Final Gather on in 3ds max. The resolution is 640x480 with final gather quality on "draft". I've set up a distributed bucket-rendering system between my three computers, eight cores in total. But after it gets to like frame ~300 or so (it depends on what quality final gather is on) I get a "Mental Ray error: not enough memory, must shut down" error. My brother said that it's because Windows by default only allows so much memory to be allocated to a program. So far I haven't been able to find something in google (I'm probably just using the wrong terms). But if you can point me in the right direction, it'll be greatly appreciated! :)

Thanks!

[TeeKup]

Save the scenario then restart your computer.

[Snowy]

:/
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y37/snowysnowcones/gaaaaaaaaaaay.jpg

[Tweek]

you're building a movie file.

it has to store all those rendered frame in memory until it can create an output file.

render it in seperate passes.

first render out frames 0-300, and then 300-600 for example.
then just paste em back together in any movie editing app.

[Llama Juice]

How much RAM do you have?

I don't know if this is how Max works.. but in Maya what happens is that all of your file textures get loaded into your RAM (along with all sorts of other stuff of course). If those textures take up more space than your RAM has available then you'd get that error. Either way, just render out half of it... close the program... reopen and render out the other half lol.

E: Tweek posted while I was posting. Didn't notice you were outputting to an .avi ....

[Phopojijo]

you're building a movie file.

it has to store all those rendered frame in memory until it can create an output file.

render it in seperate passes.

first render out frames 0-300, and then 300-600 for example.
then just paste em back together in any movie editing app.Personally I just render them as TARGAs with alpha channels then string them together in Quicktime Pro as "Millions of Colors+"

About as lossless as it goes... and you can composite with the alpha-channel'd Quicktime movie.

Quicktime Pro is even smart enough to know -- given randomrendername_0000.tga -- to order the frames 0001, 0002, 0003 etc.

Or if you want... you can just H.264 it if you don't want to edit it later.

[Snowy]

Ok thanks, it makes sense now...

I don't want to make a new thread, so I'll ask here... How can I attach objects to biped's hand? or the figure that the biped is in?

Thanks!

[Llama Juice]

parent->child relationship. Again, not sure how to set it up in max... I really need to learn max better before trying to guide people on it...