2008

an object, the object's geometry is sent to the rendering engine only at that
point. Default=off.
This option can improve rendering speed when a large amount of the scene's
geometry is outside of the view you are rendering.
TIP When you use placeholders, 3ds Max always calculate buckets in Hilbert order.
See
Sampling Quality Rollout (mental ray Renderer) on page 6083 .
When the mental ray renderer is low on memory (as defined by the Memory
Limit setting), Use Placeholder Objects enables it to increase available memory
by deleting object geometry from the scene database. This can dramatically
reduce memory usage, but with a possible cost in rendering speed.
Memory Limit The mental ray renderer keeps a count of the memory it uses
at render time. If it reaches the specified memory limit and Use Placeholder
Objects (see preceding) is on, 3ds Max discards the geometry for some objects
in order to allocate memory for other objects. If Use Placeholder Objects is
off, or if after deleting geometry more memory is still needed, the renderer
releases texture-map memory as well. Default=650 MB.
TIP If you’d like to use a different Memory Limit setting on a regular basis without
having to change the value manually every time, store the value in a
rendering
preset
on page 5922 and then be sure to load that preset before rendering.
Use mental ray Map Manager When on, maps are read from disk and if
necessary, translated to a format that the mental ray renderer can read. When
off, maps are accessed directly from memory, and translation is unnecessary.
Default=off.
Following is a complete list of differences between turning this option on and
off:
When on:
■ mental ray reads textures directly from disk (mental ray is able to flush
textures out of memory when memory is low). Also, textures are loaded
only if needed.
■ mental ray uses its built-in pyramid filtering system. These pyramid lookup
tables can be flushed out of memory when memory is low.
■ Texture formats not supported directly by mental ray are read by 3ds Max
and sent, before rendering begins, as binary data to mental ray.
mental ray Renderer | 6125