30+ GB memory consumption

[TheLooopCGI]

Hi everybody,

I was thinking about asking this question for some time now. You see, in our line of work (high resolution car advertising for print) we often exceed 30GB of RAM usage in our scenes. Sometimes when we have more jobs at the same time we are low on render power and then we get all those questioning looks from render-farm owners when we tell them we need to rent computers with at least 30GB of ram... Everybody is asking like what do we need so much memory for?? Sometimes it feels that everyone is just using lowpoly models...

Do you guys also have these kind of "crazy" memory requirements for "simple" scenes? By simple I mean one polygonal car (about 5,000,000 polys), some motion blur, vray displacement here and there, all into 10,000px output...

I'll be happy to hear your comments.

[Janosik]

no my maximal ram consumption was around 16 gb but with mucho trees

[werticus]

there is quality and there is excessive quality... maybe you could optimize more without compromising any visual quality. (im almost certain you could) vray displacement is the memory killer, try upping the size of the edges and you might well find you dont see a difference and halve the ram requirement.

[scottsch]

Have you tried using Softimage or other application to compare memory usage? I hit the wall with 3dsmax all the time, I'm always surprised how much memory 3dsmax uses.