Optimizing scenes in 3ds Max | Part 1: Geometry

Results of a bad optimization

Here’s what you may experience:

• High RAM usage may cause your scene to crash during the rendering or cause it to render too slow. That’s simply because the program needs to constantly write and read the temporary data from a hard drive. The hard drive is a 1000 times slower than RAM, even SSDs are much, much slower.
• Overblown scene settings such as polycount, quality, and sampling may lead to long render times that in turn may result in a missed deadline, or, when dealing with render farms, you can expect a higher cost.
• The more hard drive space your project requires (including both the scene and assets), the longer it will load to 3ds Max. When rendering locally that is probably not a big deal, but in network rendering, you will probably experience longer render times. Also, in case of commercial render farms, longer loading time generally equals higher cost.

Who is this guide for?

This guide is for every 3D artist who have had an unpleasant experience with too high resource usage when rendering a project locally or on a network.

You will find useful optimisation techniques for beginner and intermediate 3ds Max users. If you are an advanced user, you probably already know most of them, but still you might find some new information here. There is a saying, you don’t know what you don’t know.

The optimization methods listed below will be especially useful to animators as even a slight increase in render time is multiplied by the number of frames in your animation.

The aim of this guide is simple - reduce the render time and RAM usage - and gain more time for the creative side of the project, save time and money and have more satisfied clients.

1. Geometry