sunday vivian street

After spending two hours at the start of today organising my iterations into a master file so I can get an idea of the size of the file I might have to render, I realised my work was going to be too heavy.
Twenty-five iterations equalled 1.5 GB and it was only going to get worse. I spoke to a few colleagues (comparing notes on file sizes - one had all 81 iterations, lit and material applied and it was less than 300 MB) which confirmed what I had been thinking anyway... I needed to scrap it all and start again if I have any hope of completing the 81 iterations.
So with a heavy heart I started a new file. I began with the first iteration but this time I modified both objects with pro-optimizer reducing the number of vertices from 1400 to 100 on the red object alone and already the file was significantly lighter.

This is it (compare it to the original here):

Iteration No 1

 I smoothed it along the way and it looked fine. They are not the delicate objects I loved but I noticed right away the speed at which it saved (Instantaneous instead of minutes at a time) and each modification happened quickly. I scaled my objects as I went and inside four hours I had 25 objects. I rendered them all in five minutes and thirty-one seconds – unbelievable. The next test is being able to work at home especially the rendering as I am now stuck out here in P Bay till Tuesday.

Here are the first 25 iterations:

I do feel as though my work would have really benefited had we been warned (at an earlier stage) how file size can dramatically affect the speed at which you can work in 3ds Max. The up side of that is that I am HIGHLY aware in this aspect of 3ds Max now. I also found out today that collapsing each iteration as I go actually increases the size of the file, so I am now only collapsing every now and then (when they get too busy).