if you are going have that many copies of an object in a scene you have to make them very efficient. very low res.
The question is really, what is you're goal for the image. are you going to see them very close up or are you making an animation where you start close and then zoom out to show the full screen? what I would be thinking about is perhaps make a small section with high res detailed LED globes and then as the camera pulls out use another simpler model to blend to. you could render the same camera and fade between them both or something like that. It really just depends on what you're video or still image is going to be. usually you have to decide that first and then figure out tricks and efficiency methods to get the shot to work without running out of memory.

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Thanks for your reply.

Can you tell me how to make an object very low res? I'm really new at this and only work with 3D Max for a while. I have not yet figured out all the settings. What makes an object low res?

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By Low res I mean very few polygons in the mesh. So in you're bulb you would try and make the shape using a sphere with 8 segments and perhaps extrude the bottom of it. Of course if you're camera is right up close you may need to make them more detailed. it depends on you're shot but max is going to start getting pretty overwhelmed when you start getting millions of polygons in your scene. you can right click the objects and in object properties show them as boxes. that way you will get better performance in the viewport but it might still crash when you go to render.

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So I guess the only way to do make an object like that as close to reality ax possible is when you own the kind of computerpower Pixar has

That's a shame. I was hoping to find some kind repeat function to repeat my module automaticly. Anyway, I'll try making the same led with a low poly and use that one for the distance shots.

Thanks for your help.

One more question, is there any other software that can do this better then 3DMax?

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Well kind of. If you had a 64 bit machine with loads of ram you could render almost any scene but it would still become very slow.
Even Pixar need to optimise their scenes and use tricks to make each shot work. like for example rendering things in passes or using
level of detail methods so the closer objects use higher res meshes and objects in the distance use a lower detail mesh.
There is also the option of using vray which lets you export meshes as proxies which means you can render much more geometry by
loading the meshes up at render time instead of having them loaded into the max scene. Vray is a renderer plugin for 3ds max. I didnt mention it straight away because it is pretty advanced and there is quite a big learning curve.
There isnt really any software that would be better at rendering very large scenes out there, maya and max are the biggest pro level packages and both would have similar limitations, but you could try using Vue to render something like this, it can chew through millions and millions of polygons but it is not the same type of pro software for 3d modelling, its more set up for doing landscapes but it wont crash even if you scatter a few million bulbs. but forget about animating cameras and rendering with fast results its usually more trouble than its worth unless you are making a still landscape background for matte painting.

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I have been looking at Vue to do it in. The only thing stopping me so far was learning a new program while I'm still a beginner in 3DMax. But I must say that I don't plan to do any animation with my scenes. It's pure for advertising reasons. I have a product, LED Screens, that I import from China but these Chinese people are not able to send me good images of the product for some bizar reason and if I receive good images, they have their watermark all over them. That's why I started to make them myself so I can use them on my website and in brochures. The reason why I wanted to do a full sized model of a screen is so I can place it in real photographs with photoshop.

I thank you very much for your advice and I think I can manage now. I use Vray and will take a look at the settings. I know it's complicated but who knows, I might understand it, hehe.

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