Question

I’ve set up a script in 3ds max to render a bunch of animations into frames. To do this, I open up a file with all of the materials, load an animation (as a bip) onto the figure, then render.

We were seeing a problem where eventually the script would fail because it was unable to open the next file– max had consumed all of the system memory. Closing max, of course, freed the memory, and we were able to continue with the script.

I checked out the heapfree variable, hoping to see a memory leak within my script, hoping to see a memory leak within my own (maxscript) code– but the amount of free space was the same after every animation.

Then, it must be 3ds max which is consuming all of that memory. Nothing in max need be saved from animation to animation– is there some way to get max to free that memory? (I’ve tried resetMaxFile() and manually deleting all of the objects in the scene). Is there any known sets of operations that cause max to grow out of control?

Answer 1

Have you tried to add this at the end of your loop:
gc()

it does a garbarge collect and frees up some space.
However I suspect the bip part to be leaky.