2008

When off:
■ 3ds Max reads the textures from disk, and then sends individual pixel
colors to mental ray as they are needed.
NOTE 3ds Max reads the textures from disk and keeps them stored in memory
between renders. This can make renders faster, because the bitmaps don’t
need to be reloaded every time. 3ds Max will not read the texture from disk
if it was already loaded previously (for example, in a previous render, for a
Material Editor preview, or for displaying the map in a viewport).
■ Rendering uses a pyramid filter shader that is identical to the standard 3ds
Max pyramid filter system.
Turning this option on is useful for large scenes that take a lot of memory to
render. Turning it off is quicker, because textures already loaded in memory
don’t have to be reloaded by mental ray. But turning it off might use more
memory and doesn’t allow for flushing when memory is low, unless you use
the 3ds Max
bitmap pager on page 7560 .
NOTE Turning the option on and off might result in very small differences between
rendered images because of the different algorithms used in the mental ray map
manager and the 3ds Max map manager.
You must turn on “Use mental ray Map Manager” when performing these
actions:
■ Using distributed bucket rendering.
See
Distributed Bucket Rendering Rollout (mental ray Renderer) on page
6131 .
When rendered with distributed bucket rendering and the mental ray map
manager, images with textures can look different than when rendered with
3ds Max alone, because the filtering technique is different.
■ Exporting to an MI file.
See below.
Conserve Memory Tells the translator to be as memory efficient as it can.
This can slow down the translation process, but reduces the amount of data
being sent to the mental ray renderer. Default=off.
This option is useful when you are trying to render a huge scene and time is
not necessarily an issue. When you render to an MI file, this option can also
help reduce the size of the output file.
6126 | Chapter 18 Rendering