[thaBadfish]

I've been trying to use Maxwell Grass in a project where the topography to which the modifier is applied is rather large, and I'm having some speed issues with the render process. Everything runs smoothly until I get to "[Extension MGrassP] Allocating grass data structures" which either hangs or takes so long that the process is unviable.

My scene is a Revit project brought into 3DS Max, Maxwell materials applied and .mxs and .mxi files generated. I open the mxs file in studio to add the grass modifier using "fast generic grass for housing projects" settings listed at support.nextlimit.com/display/knfaq/Grass+Examples . I used LOD settings of 5m / 50m / 5%; display settings of 100% / 100000.

I was able to render the grass successfully yesterday, but today after assigning more maxwell materials to the scene, I am unable to progress past the allocating stage. It's possible I don't remember my LOD settings, or something. Anything about my process stand out as incorrect?

Thanks in advance

[A bit more info]
I figured I'd post the whole MGrassP console output, since that seems to be where my problem lies.

[Extension MGrassP] MWGrass : 13962150, Points per grass blade : 4

It then goes into the allocating stage, where it hangs. Is the MWGrass number too high? The topography is rather large, but again I WAS able to successfully render the grass yesterday, just without many maxwell materials applied to the scene, and I may have forgotten what my LOD setting was.

[Bubbaloo]

What is your RAM usage at the time that Maxwell hangs?

[thaBadfish]

99%, CPU usage around 10%

I am about to leave the office, and will let the computer continue to run to see if/how long it takes to get past this allocation stage - still at 99% physical memory.

[Bubbaloo]

It will slow to a crawl when it hits the RAM limits. You need to reduce the number of blades/segments to fit in your memory capacity.

[thaBadfish]

Thanks for the response.
I'm not sure what your familiarity with maxwell grass is, but do you have any recommendations to optimize my procedure? I'm wondering which setting(s) should be reduced first. I've been tinkering with density, LOD, and display settings, since they seem the most obvious, but maybe I'm overlooking something.

[numerobis]

maybe read the last post again...

You need to reduce the number of blades/segments to fit in your memory capacity.

[thaBadfish]

I reduced the blades significantly, and now when I get to the allocating phase of the render, RAM usage is around 51%. It still hangs.

The other day's render never ended up progressing past allocating.

EDIT:
Solved the problem. It didn't end up being an issue with the grass at all, but rather a material with displacement mapping set to adaptive that was causing the render to hang.