I hate to join a forum and immediately ask for help with something, but I've got a really stubborn problem with 3DS Max.

Recently I've been working on a scene comprising of around 40,000 polygons, in which are around 30-40 objects (so relatively low-poly).

Previously in MAX I've never had problems with rendering - I just hit "render" and it 'works'. With this scene though I'm having massive problems with supposed "out of memory" errors. I'm running Windows XP, updated to recent standards, and I have a gig of RAM.

I start to render, and before it gets to the actual rendering (around the "preparing lights" phase), the renderer crashes, with the message "The application has run out of memory and will now close; would you like to save a copy of the scene?" (it always saves flawlessly by the way). Usually it happens on the 2nd or third render since I booted MAX, but if I have the whole scene in view it can happen on the first render.

I'm only rendering at around 700x400 resolution (widescreen). Each object has (usually) three textures (Diffuse, Specular and Bump) which are always under 1024x1024. At first I thought it was because all my textures were TGAs, so I changed them to JPGs to save memory (compressing them from 300mb to around 12mb).

I also reduced the shadow map resolution from around 10,000 to 1024, in an effort to see if it would fix the problem, but it still hasn't. I tried increasing the size of my windows page file, still no effect. Tried using the bitmap pager, no effect. Turned on "conserve memory", no effect. It still claims to be running out of memory, despite me having 600mb of physical memory free, as well as a 3gb page file. I just don't understand what's wrong.

I'm starting to suspect that it's a bug, but I've looked online and can't seem to find acceptable precedents. One stated that MAX's default renderer just can't handle renders above 1.8gb of size in memory, but I don't understand why my scene has such a large memory footprint.

As a last resort I switched the render from MAX's default to Mental Ray. This did actually work, and it rendered - but for it to render properly I'd have to remake all my materials with mr's shaders and I don't want to do that if I can avoid it.

I could use Render to Texture, and merely render out all my shadows etc. The problem is that I still need the surfaces to have specular and bump interaction, so merely rendering out a Complete Map and turning off all the lighting isn't an option.

Can anyone help me out with this?

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