Oh.. sorry.. I've tried rendering at various image sizes from 800x600 to 1600x1200 and even 3200x2400. I stall at all file sizes.

not sure on the ram, but from your description of the scene as a "complex urbanscape", I would ask whether you are using any of the 3DS foliage? If so, make sure that it's instanced, not copied. This goes for any repetitive objects, but I've noticed that having even one plant in there slows things down especially much, so that's the most important one to make sure it's instanced, not copied.

Thanks.

I'm not using any foliage (doing that in Photoshop). There are quite a few instanced objects (mostly bridge elements and lofted/lathed pillers/supports and a few background buildings). I'm pretty sure that things are optimized.

i don't know what operating system you're running, but even the latest Windows can only handle 3 Gigs of Ram (unless you have installed a new special driver that I've heard fixes this problem)

you may try rendering "Region", this should render quicker than "View" mode because it's not calculating anything out of the region. just drag the region frame to encompass you entire viewport.

next, check your Raytrace depth under Render, Raytrace settings. I think it defaults to 9 which is quite excessive. You can turn it down to 2 or 3 and not notice any depreciation in quality

Also, if you have any wireframes or small finickey lines that don't necessarily need to be reflected, try turning off their "visible to reflection/refraction" option under object properties

if this doesn't work i've got a nice 3 step process that never fails:

step 1. unplug computer
step 2. open window
step 3. toss computer out window

awww...now don't you feel much better?

hmm.. Thanks. changing the raytrace depth seems to help for lower resolution renders (800x600). But stupid question.. if Max can only address 1 mg of RAM at a time (regardless of windows addressing or page/swap file size), what's the point of having all those high end rendering options built into the app? Or are they assuming that we only do partial renders and do all image assembly in other apps? The Autodesk online help library is helpless (pun intended) on memory mgmt issues.

Maybe its time to trade down to Rhino...

how long are you waiting once it hits that special point? when you say it just stops, do you mean the default scanline just sits there, or that it closes the rendering window, or that it closes the program.

if it is just stopping at 40%, and it is still up, my guess is that it is choking on the raytrace items, just a guess. you may try and change the material to non raytrace just for a trial run to see if it will finish a rendering.

in the past, if the program can't handle something for me, it either:

1 - stops and gives me a message saying so.
2 - shuts down the program.
3 - goes so slow when it hits a particular item/material, i might as well grow a beard and rename myself to van winkle.

if all else follows, follow wansta's last instructions, and if you could invite me, i would like to go catch your computer and take it home.

In non raytrace its fine.. its also fine if I turn off reflect raytrace for any one of the two materials (water/glass reflect). If both are on raytrace, the program continues to run but the rendering process appears to stall and processor load gradually falls to passive levels. I've left it there for up to 48 hours with zero progress.

try downloading brazil and testing the raytrace engine they have, or maybe try mental ray sionce it is built in already (use the mental ray glass, and the water). i will be trying brazil this weekend, and have gotten good result from mental ray in max.

i've done the 48 hour wait before, and that blows. i'll think about it when i am in front of max tonight. good luck.

The exact same thing has happened to me before. It's the ray tracing that kills it i think. Make sure you exclude from reflection/refraction all the objects in your scene that don't need it. To do so just select the objects, right click and under properties turn off the 'visible to reflection/refraction' option. This might help. You can also repeat the operation for objects that don't need to cast shadows by turning off the receive and cast shadows option in the same pop-up menu. This usually reduces rendering times dramatically. Good luck

are you using something like Light Tracer? That's a killer for sure.

You've got the power. 4gigs doesn't help much. Up Windows to the 3gigs, that should help some. But that still only allocates 2 gigs to a program (and max can use that, I reach that limit often enough).

Try Final Render or one of the others. They all have far superior raytracing, even if you don't use their GI.

Thanks. No, not using light tracer... I removed reflections from two complex polygons and reduced the layers to three, and that seems to have solved the immediate rendering problem, but I still can't get Max to exceed 1 gig memory utilization, so there must be something else going on. Windows (and other apps like Photoshop) are clearly using the fujll 3 gigs.

give something like Vray a shot. It should be able to handle it. it can handle vast amounts of instanced geometry with barely a hiccup. Could you post an image of your render (without all the raytraced materials) so that we can get a better idea of what you're trying to do?

try the scanline renderer . Or a real simple solution is copy and paste the entire model to a new file. Then cut out (delete or whatever) the part that you won't need to render anyways. In this case 3d max wont render the part of the model which you dont need anyways.