Estimating Ram requirements

[Adam H. Stewart]

This could be like that eternal question - how long it is a piece of string, but I wondering if there is any logic to how you estimate your ram requirements.

I am working on a project in Maya on a project that has something like 4 thousand textures ( it came from ILM ). I know that I don't have enough ram on the main machine I have been using, which has 3 gigs of ram, but if I was to order another more meaty 64bit machine is there any logical way to estimate how much ram is required.

I'm thinking in my perfect World that there is some sort of formula say - texture size x GI x Reflections x polygon count = X amount of Ram.

Any idea's ?

Thanks as always for your help.

[instinct]

there is kinda. But constructing the formula and calcing it through would take you long enough that the time you sepnd makes you loose so much worktime that you can just as well grab the biggest box available for the same money :P

j/k

Regards,
Thorsten

[dcullipher]

With that amount of textures I would go for at least 8G. If each texture is around a Meg then it may take 4G just for those, more if it's JPG textures.

Not to mention starting to add a good amount of polys and displacement.

Even our render nodes are 8G now.

[Adam H. Stewart]

Cool

I was thinking 6 to 8 gigs - I have cut alot of the textures down in size to try to squeeze out a couple of renders on our under-whelming machines, when we first got the files some of the textures where just massive 4-5 K, but then again - they are about to release the IMAX version of this film, when you get up close and personal you are going to see alot of stuff you wouldn't normally.

Here is a possibly stupid question, what is the best file type to use for the texture maps. They came in as tiffs but we converted them to jpegs thinking they would save Ram, did I do the wrong thing ?

I have a script that connects everything together so in theory I could re-run it with a bit of jiggy in the .ma and save the files to any format we want - what is the best one to use ?

I am presuming maybe incorrectly that a 32bit installation of Maya on a 64bit machine will be able to see more then 2 gigs or Ram ? Should I plan to install 64bit Maya ?

Thanks as always I'll put in my request for a monster 8 gig machine today - Whoopie, I've never used more them 3 gigs - it'll be the Hummer of the office - Bigger is Better

[^Lele^]

Jpegs will only save you disk-space: they'll be just as big as the uncompressed TIFFs (bar bit-depth conversion) once loaded in ram for rendering.
The only two ways i know of are to either palettize (turn into 256 -or less- colours GIFs, then the size on disk will be exactly the size in ram) or use wavelet compression (http://www.wavgen.com/)

[Neilg]

Where do you work that you get files from ILM all the time and have trouble dealing with them?

[Adam H. Stewart]

8 gigs it is

I work in Burbank, CA the company does a huge amount of work for Paramount, mainly in DVD's but we are branching out this will be our first commercial, although we have done stuff for E3 and lots and lots for Apple. I suspect but I can't say for certain that we got the files as a side bar to another vendor needing them. I don't think they where specificially prepped for us, but have been passed around to various people working on the parts of the project.

We just got final approval for the project and talking to the producer we have decided to put 8 gigs per machine on our render rack and just pray that will be enough. We never tried rendering the full res textures, I think ther nearest we got was 25%.

Here's a question - can I run a 32bit app on a 64bit OS and take advantage of more then 2 gigs of ram ? I am a little leery of upgrading Maya to 64bit just now.

Of course the other scary part of this is I want to use Vray for Maya which I haven't really tested that much, I just loath the Mental Ray machine limit.

Thanks as always for your help.

[rivoli]

Re: 8 gigs it is

Here's a question - can I run a 32bit app on a 64bit OS and take advantage of more then 2 gigs of ram ?

if the 32 app is large address aware (max is, so I guess maya as well), it should be able to use up to 4 gigs of memory.
before max 64 came out I happened to use something about 3,7 3,8 gigs of memory with max 32 under xp 64, but if you want maya to make use all those 8 gigs of ram then you definitely need the 64 bit version.

[werticus]

all my machines are 8gb

and i think by next year they will be 12 or more.