---
title: "Rendering Very Large Images"
canonical: "https://documentation.chaos.com/space/VMAX/113575511/Rendering%20Very%20Large%20Images"
format: markdown
---
This page provides a tutorial on rendering large images with V-Ray.



**Overview**

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<span style="color: #000000">Rendering very large images can be memory-intensive, as very large resolutions require more memory to be added to the scene's own memory needs. This tutorial explains how to set up V-Ray to render very large images </span><span style="color: #000000">*directly to disk*</span><span style="color: #000000">, optimizing memory efficiency. By writing the rendering image file directly to disk, the memory buffer is disabled, saving on overall memory use. This is very advantageous for machines with limited memory.</span>

> ⚠️ The Progressive sampler type is not supported for rendering out large images in this way.

Want to follow along but don’t have a license?

> Macro (ui-button)





<span style="color: #000000"> </span>

## <span style="color: #000000">**Setting Up to Render Large Images**</span>

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- <span style="color: #000000">In the Common tab of the Render Setup dialog, set the 3ds Max output resolution to something small, like 100x100 pixels:</span>
  
- <span style="color: #000000">Switch to the V-Ray tab and make sure that the V-Ray frame buffer is enabled.</span>
- Turn off the <span style="color: #000000">**Memory frame buffer**</span><span style="color: #000000"> option - this causes V-Ray to not allocate memory to hold the final image. Instead, it will be writing directly to disk.</span>
- <span style="color: #000000">Turn off the option </span><span style="color: #000000">**Get resolution from 3ds Max**</span><span style="color: #000000">, and then set the desired resolution in the </span><span style="color: #000000">**VFB**</span><span style="color: #000000">, such as </span><span style="color: #000000">*30000 x 20000*</span><span style="color: #000000"> shown below.</span>
  
- Turn on the <span style="color: #000000">**V-Ray raw image file**</span><span style="color: #000000"> option, and s</span>elect a <span style="color: #000000">*.vrimg*</span><span style="color: #000000"> or OpenEXR file output file name, as shown above. You are also able to select a Multi-Channel OpenEXR as the output format. Note that if you choose an OpenEXR file, it will be a tiled file and not scanline-based, because the </span><span style="color: #000000">**Memory frame buffer**</span><span style="color: #000000"> is off. However, OpenEXR files do support multi-channel output when the </span><span style="color: #000000">**Memory frame buffer**</span><span style="color: #000000"> is turned off.</span>
- <span style="color: #000000">Optionally, turn on the </span><span style="color: #000000">**Generate preview**</span><span style="color: #000000"> option so that V-Ray can generate a small resolution preview of the final result.</span>
- <span style="color: #000000"> In the Image sampler rollout, switch the Image sampler </span><span style="color: #000000">**Type **</span><span style="color: #000000">to </span><span style="color: #000000">*Bucket *</span><span style="color: #000000">as shown below.</span>  
  
  
> Macro (inline-media-image)
- <span style="color: #000000">Render the image.</span>
- <span style="color: #000000">If you rendered to a </span><span style="color: #000000">*.vrimg*</span><span style="color: #000000"> file, you can use the </span>[VRImg to OpenEXR](https://docs-chaos.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/VMAX/pages/113575617) <span style="color: #000000">tool to convert the file to a scanline-based OpenEXR file.</span>


> ℹ️ Due to the increase in the image resolution, you may find that the render settings may need to be revised to keep the render noise-free due to the large size.