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Oleg · Site Admin

Hello,

I have Particle Studio for MAX 7, but can not keep it running. It crashes all the time when I go to render.

Dell Dimension PIII 2.9GHZ
1GB RAM
NVIDIA GEFORCE FX 5200 128MB RAM

Don’t know if the video card and system have anything to do with it but I thought I would supply it.

Thank you,
J.

Oleg · Site Admin

Dear J,

I performed an analysis and test runs of the scene that you sent to my address. The instability mentioned is due to the memory limits imposed by the Windows operating system.

Your scene has just 3000 particles, however every particle consists of 320 faces. The total amount of faces (960,000) does not look much however if you take into account that every frame is rendered with object motion blur with duration subdivision = 15 that pushes the total amount of faces to be rendered per a given frame to over 14 millions faces. As a result, during render the total amount of memory required to render a frame is close to 2 GB. It's a known problem with 3dsmax (and other Windows applications) that it becomes unstable when an application reaches the memory limits imposed by the operating system. If /3GB switch is not used (as for Windows XP), then the limit is 2GB of available memory (physical and hard drive swap files). That is exactly what happened with your scene.

To remedy the problem you have to balance the amount of particles, complexity of the geometry used for a particle, and object motion blur duration subdivisions. And watch the task manager to verify that you have enough available memory. I would also highly recommend increasing the amount of physical memory in your laptop from the current 1GB to 2GB of RAM. This way you would be able to avoid HDD file swapping and significantly improve render speed.

Sincerely,
Oleg B.