3DS Max 2011 Core Limiting possible?

[GR1F1TH]

Hi all,

I have a animation that I want to make with octane but the character has hair that would put a crazy amount of poly's in the scene. So I'd like to split it up and render the character in scanline or mental ray and the scene in octane. Being limited by one computer I would like to render both at the same time. The issue I'm running into with my tests is that 3DS Max will hog 100% of all cores and is causing a significant drag on octane's performance. Does anyone know if there is a way to throttle the 3DS renderer? I've tried turning off multi-threading but there was no improvement. Is there a way to throttle or core limit through a max script?

[[gk]]

You can dedicate application usage pr cpu.

However I wouldnt recomend to render in octane and in max on same time just because its possible..
Render a pass, then the next one, thats the correct way to do it.

-mads

[GeoPappas]

See if this helps:

- Go to the Windows Task Manager (you can get to it by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del and choosing Start Task Manager).

- Go to the Processes tab

- Select the process that you wish to throttle (e.g., 3DSMax)

- Right-click on the process and choose "Set Affinity" from the pull down menu.

- Choose which CPUs you want the process to use and hit the OK button.

FYI: I made this list using a Win Vista, so it might be slightly different under Win 7.

[GR1F1TH]

The application throttling works great. Except my UPC can't handle a 1200 watt discharge rate with gpu & cpu running maxed out. (does the same thing in Iray too... same scenario )

next issue: I seem to be having difficulty rendering one specific element from 3ds max. When I specify just the hair element it renders everything and then saves out just the hair pass. I've even tried adding all the elements and disabling all but the hair pass and it still renders everything and saves the hair pass. To my understanding it should not be rendering anything but the pass I specify. This may not be the right place to have this answered though. Thanks for helping with the app throttling.

I know I should render each pass separate but I would rather have 60 hours of down time and not 76 hours. That's just the math I've got for this two minute short which I'm sure you know would grow with every added minute. three min=90hr vs 114hr, four min=120hr vs 152hr
And does this rule of thumb really apply for two different rendering engines using separate ram and processing (mostly)? I know it does not make sense to open two programs vying for the same resources. Is there something else that makes it smarter to render one after the other in this setup? Even if one render goes wrong (say hair dynamics looks wrong) are you not still saving time because one render did work out?