Dynamically assigned Dynamic Memory in BB

[jonahhawk]

We have (nearly) all of our office computers in four locations around the country on our farm. Needless to say there is quite a variation in performance, RAM etc. We are starting to have a trickle of 64bit machines, 5 at the moment. To keep the 32 bit machines from crashing on large jobs, we put the dynamic memory down below 600, sometimes 400. This does the trick for conserving RAM but it totally limits the performance of the 64bit machines. Their processors are never at 100%.

It would be great if there were some way to pole the BB client list for the amount of RAM and set the Dynamic memory per task/frame accordingly.

We have global groups in BB and can divide up frames between different groups with different settings. but this is lame and not the most efficient method.

I guess the bottom line is that I wish BB was a bit more open and scriptable.

[RErender]

This is doable, just need a callback script that checks something, maxscript has access to the host system's memory info, computer name, cpu count etc and is easy to get. I imagine just about everything can be read now with the addition of the dot net classes but I'm not up on those. So you could set the dynamic memory per some rules in vray before it renders.

[jonahhawk]

This sounds very promising.

I'm hoping it would be something that would work with BB. BB would dole out frames as usual but when it assigns frames to a 64bit machine it would go into the file and raise the dynamic memory limit before passing the file to the node.

Since I posted last I did figure out that Bitmap Proxies will save this particular scene. But more and more we frequently have to drop the dynamic memory for our ever larger master plans and the such.