BSP tree optimisation: might need help!

[studioDIM]

I'm in the process of rendering a huge park with some 1500+ polygonal trees in it.
Having a pc with 2 gigs of ram, the whole scene loaded takes some 1700 megs (bounding boxes, no textures visible).

Tonight, before coming home from the studio, i attempted a few renders with little luck, for very obvious reasons.

Now, my simple question is: is there a "limit" setting to the dynamic BSP that allows for very little RAM usage?
RenderTimes would be uninportant, at this stage, as the hand optimisation of the large amount of trees would probably require more time in the way of script creation, import/optimisation and substitution.

I already could render a scene that would crash with an "out of memory" error raising the face/level coefficient to 10 (from the default of 2), but that had only 750 trees :P

It's not a terminal problem as i do know alternative ways of rendering the image (hiding and chunking out the final render to manageable bits), but i would love to understand the BSP behaviour in such a limit case...

Anyone has been in this situation before?

Thanks for your help,

Lele

[studioDIM]

Overridden: i somehow completely overlooked the Proxies option, lost in the details of planting the trees.

I'd still love to understand if extreme BSP values might help in similar situations, though...

Lele

[vlado]

Usually the additional memory for the acceleration structure is quite small; it is the sheer amount of actual triangles that takes up most of the RAM. While playing with the BSP tree settings might shave off some megabytes, they are like a drop in the ocean compared to everything else (e.g. 50 MB on a scene that takes 1.5 GB otherwise).

Best regards,
Vlado

[studioDIM]

Ahh, yes, most clarifying, thankyou.

Btw, the proxies made my day: not only the dynamic raycaster is qorking nicely, but the speed at which it loads the 17 different plant types through instanced proxies is astonishing.

Nice one!

Lele