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ilka
08-14-2003, 01:21 AM
I was playing with light and I made a box and a plane for the ground, then I made a helix and I used the spacing tool to spread the omni light and made 322 omni light at 0.1 multiplier and the shadows was on for all of them, the I tried to render the scene but this error massage poped up.

Can max only handle certan of lights only?
or is it my comp (P4 1.7 - 512mb - Gforce 3 ti 200)

Edit: By the way I am using max 5.1
magicm
08-14-2003, 01:41 AM
ilka,

no, that's not a bug

take a look at the 'mapsize' of your omni's. they're on 512 per default, which means that a 512x512 grayscale bitmap is created for each omni....

so in your case that's 322 bitmaps of 512x512 pixels, which means max needs to parse 84410368 pixels.. :arteest:


Martijn
ilka
08-14-2003, 01:56 AM
Ohhh thanx magicm :)
opus13
08-14-2003, 04:33 PM
quick tip for faking a skylight (that avoids this problem):

take your light, and use the helix as the animation controller.
set your start and end keys 1 frame apart, and render the second frame with motion blur on.

with minimal tweaking you can get prettyy damn good results for being a 'hack'.
ilka
08-14-2003, 06:51 PM
Thanx for that tip opus13, Im still a newbie
Bobo
08-15-2003, 01:23 PM
Originally posted by magicm
ilka,

no, that's not a bug

take a look at the 'mapsize' of your omni's. they're on 512 per default, which means that a 512x512 grayscale bitmap is created for each omni....

so in your case that's 322 bitmaps of 512x512 pixels, which means max needs to parse 84410368 pixels.. :arteest:


Martijn


It is even worse!

An Omni will generate SIX shadow maps - one for each direction! So make this 512 x 512 x 6.
In addition, shadow maps are not just greyscale, they are real Z-depth maps which store the distance from the light to the point in space the light first hits geometry. So they need a couple of bytes to store this info (I think max uses 4 bytes per texel, I might be wrong though)

No wonder memory can get low.
Also, shadow maps require contiguos memory space to be stored in. If the memory is fragmented, there might be no space even with alot of RAM.
Some people find out that restarting max after shadow errors sometimes helps fit the shadows in memory again...
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