Maxwell Render | Official public forum

I have a rendering I am working on that I wanted to render at a larger resolution... I was basically doubling 1920x1080 so it was 3840x2160 for a large board. (which I realize is actually quadrupling pixels)

It renders fine at 1920, but at 3800 Maxwell render crashes while it is processing / voxelization etc.. I get out of memory errors. I got this list of error files below... but when I go to the folder the files are not there?
C:\Users\render1\AppData\Local\Temp\WERDE1E.tmp.WERInternalMetadata.xml
C:\Users\render1\AppData\Local\Temp\WERFB6F.tmp.appcompat.txt
C:\Users\render1\AppData\Local\Temp\WERFD34.tmp.mdmp

Anyway I tried increasing the page file to 1.5 times my ram... (Ram is 16gb) but that did not help either. Any suggestions? Am I asking too much relative to the rendering size on a complex model?

I am using a lot of large proxies for trees. There are also a lot of emitters.
The Maxwell scene file from sketchup is 275MB. No grass. No materials with Displacement.

The machine is... Intel R Xeon R CPU E5-2690 0 2.90GHz 32cores 16 GB Maxwell2.7.20.0 Win64

Thanks for any suggestions..
Derek

First, I'd check on the use of Color Multilight. Exhaustion of memory space due to an increase in output resolution fits that profile.

If that's not it, grass is the only other factor that comes to mind, since without Multilight, this size resolution requires only about 3/4 GB. I know you say there is no grass, but you may want to double-check this in Maxwell Render's Console window, as the scene is being preprocessed -- if there's grass, you will find mention of allocation being done by the MaxwellGrass and MGrassH/MGrassP/MaxwellHair extensions. If so, here is a Ruby one-liner that can be used to clear grass settings from all groups in a model:
It is also possible, though, that you have no grass enabled in your SketchUp model, and that it is instead enabled in an MXS you're referencing - the above script wouldn't be able to help with that, you'd need to open the MXS and disable grass there.

I am using multi-light with color. Its rendering something else now, but I will try it again without Color as soon as its done.
That ruby for getting rid of all grass is great thanks.. That was actually the first thing I thought about and removed all the grass I had checking it was gone in the console so I am pretty sure it is not that. I have a LOT of emitters so its probably the color on the multi-light.

Thanks again JD
Derek

I think I should warn that the script does not disable grass from groups -- it completely removes it. Meaning that it will put all grass settings back to default, for every group in the model.

I turned off multi-light color and all was well running the rendering in Maxwell. I am now having issues with the same file exporting it out of sketchup. I have added another building to the site and it is a pretty big file. Additionally I am trying to use proxies for 3 nice trees. I get one of three things happening. The output just stops writing in the middle of the component section. I get a temp folder full error (but can't figure out which temp folder it is referring to) or I get a bugsplat. I am wondering if I should be breaking the model up and somehow assembling it back together in Studio?

Thanks for any suggestions

If you're talking about Fire, and by "proxies" you are not referring to the use SketchUp geometry and not MXS References, then I'd try right-clicking on your trees and enabling Maxwell > UV Coordinates > Ignore Distortion. If you look in C:\Users\[username]\Documents\Maxwell\SketchUp\temp\textures, you may find that SketchUp is writing some thousands of textures for your trees, due to each and every leaf containing texture distortion. If that is the issue, then with Ignore Distortion enabled, while mapping of the leaf textures may not be perfectly accurate (and may possibly be very inaccurate), at least you will not end up with all these textures.

That is just a guess. I am not sure what is being referred to by "temp" folder, as the message you refer to will not be something coming from the plugin. And regardless of all of this, for trees and such, I would highly recommend opening each tree as a separate SKP, setting up the materials how you want them to be, exporting to MXS, and then referencing the MXS files in models where you want to use the trees, rather than inserting the SKPs as components or groups.

I was not referring to fire. I was referring to file export 3d model to mxs from sketchup. I just checked that folder and it contained only the materials in the model. I am not using (that I know of) distortion, and I am guessing that since there is only one copy of the material in that folder that is the case.

I think what you are saying is I can reference the tree in maxwell instead of sketchup. That makes a lot more sense, I will look into that. Thanks.
Derek

Regarding distortion, you probably would not know if it was present or not, unless you have created these trees yourself, other than by (as you guessed) observing whether many similar textures were produced during the export. When you perform a non-Fire export, though, the location to check is different: look in the /textures folder, which is created next to the output (MXS) file.

And on your last paragraph, I am saying specifically: export the trees, one-by-one, to individual MXS files. Then, you can reference the MXS files, either from Studio or the plugin. The benefits to this are that it greatly reduces the amount of geometry you load into your SketchUp model, so you save memory, and you get much quicker exports, since the plugin only has to write a file path, rather than all the tree geometry.

I did not realize I could do that.. that's a lifesaver.

I was limping by using Maxwell "proxies" instead of references. The proxies of course required the model to still be in my component list and therefore export with the model and it was just unruly.. not to mention the file size and saving times.

I just looked up and found the MXS reference. Worked like a charm. That should solve all of my memory errors etc.. I must have missed that in the manual, but it was so simple to make work.

Will I pay a penalty when I go into Maxwell Render if I overdo it with referenced geometry using the reference? By overdo it I mean create a forest or something? Are there common sense limits I should stick to relative to how many references I use and then how many instances of that reference?

Thanks again for all your help.
Derek

Each MXS reference must be loaded for rendering, whether in Fire or Maxwell Render. However, each one (meaning, each individual MXS file) only needs to be loaded once -- any further copies can be created as instances of this first concrete reference. If you place an MXS reference in Studio, and want an instance of it, you would select the reference in the object list and then right-click > Instance. In the plugin, this is handled automatically, where it will only ever be the first occurrence of a reference to a particular MXS file which will be exported as an actual MXS reference object -- any further references pointing to that MXS will be exported as instances of the initial reference.

More simply: in your SKP, you can place as many MXS references as you like, without giving it much thought.