Doing BIG renders in max 9

I have received several questions on how to make very very high res renders in 3ds max with mental ray.

When you do this, there is a memory issue (worse on 32 bits) which makes some tiles turn black, and you get poor results. mental ray actually renders the image fine, but the individual image tiles get lost due to memory being full when sent over to max.

To help you solve this issue, I wrote this very simple script (Warning: I am not a MaxScript expert, this may cause your computer to catch fire and your wife to move to Iowa, use at your own risk) that allows you to split a render into "tiles".

You simply run the script, and a dialog pops up asking you how many "tiles" you want to break the image into. Pretty simple and self-explanatory. The render is broken into pieces, and saved as separate files, which you then can assemble in, say, Photoshop or similar.

There is one important point, though;

If you are using final gathering in the scene, you must do this from a saved final gather map, or you may get artifacts in the joints between the pieces.

In theory, I could add this to the script, but since I am no MaxScript expert (see above) and since I am not made out of time... I didn't.

To do this yourself:

1. Temporarily reduce the resolution of your render to something that renders withouth memory issues.
2. Turn on FG and tell it to write to file.
3. Set your min/max sampling temporarily to 1/64 and 1/64 for a really fast render (FG quality will not be affected by this!)
4. Render.
5. Set back original sampling (and resolution).
6. Set the FG map to "Read Only"
7. Run the script to do your "split render".

Hope this helps anyone stuck in "cannot lender large resolutions" land.



Enjoy.

/Z