Dynamic memory...

[Giovanni]

Hi all,
for my large scene that will not render, the bitmap pager is not viable, since no matter what settings I use, performance goes down to a crowl.

I tried the MAX stripes, but no go, it still crashes.

Now I am tweaking the dynamic settings of Vray, I went from 2gig to 500Mb, but I cannot see any difference in the rendering process: the maps load, RAM is at about 140Mb, then irradiance map calculation starts and the RAM available plunges to some small number which causes the crash.

How you guys use the dynamic settings? My renderer PC has 2gig, 1.7 physical RAM avaialble at beginning.

See previous thread on "unexpected exception" error for more details...

Thank you

regards

gio

[Morbid Angel]

it will sound a bit blunt, but did you try 3gb switch?

[filip]

if not check this: http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...ic.php?t=14564

this could help also
http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/VRay...leshooting.htm

[Giovanni]

My render node is an off-the-shelf WinXP media center system. The /3gb switch does not work (I tried, I get the blue screen of death at boot).

Besides, Microsoft support page states that the switch is usefull to address more than 2 gig (up to 3gig), so, having only 2 gig installed it would probably be useless.

Now I created a proxy for my skydome (with a 8000px sky map!) which I forgot, and I set dynamic memory to 200Mb...It appears it is not crashing, but the irradiance map seems to be stuck at the first complex geometry the buckets encountered...

I will let it render at night, and see.

Thank you

regards

gio

[RErender]

Besides, Microsoft support page states that the switch is usefull to address more than 2 gig (up to 3gig), so, having only 2 gig installed it would probably be useless.

That's just silly

[studioDIM]

Now I created a proxy for my skydome (with a 8000px sky map!) which I forgot, and I set dynamic memory to 200Mb...It appears it is not crashing, but the irradiance map seems to be stuck at the first complex geometry the buckets encountered...

This eludes me mightily: why would you need to create a proxy to hold a skydome?
You have the max background slot for that, plus the two override maps in the render options of vray.
Are you mapping the hdri onto an object?
It feels a lot like very old LW workflow to me

Besides, an 8k px probe is fairly useless for GI: you could definitely halve (or more!) the resolution, and get exactly the same results as far as GI(and to a limit, reflections, especially glossy ones) goes. And if you need it as a high res background, render it out as a separate pass, with no geometry to bother the memory usage.

What's happening when the GI bucket seems to stop is fairly normal with vrayproxies when the proxy has to load (on the fly while it's rendering) and it's a big file (or with big maps).

my 2 cents

Lele

[TutanMark]

The /3gb switch does not work (I tried, I get the blue screen of death at boot).

Besides, Microsoft support page states that the switch is usefull to address more than 2 gig (up to 3gig), so, having only 2 gig installed it would probably be useless.

I do not agree with these words... i have 2gigs installed and is very usefull ( i say absolutely necessary) when the scene (application) is using an amount of memory very close to the 1.7gigs limit.

About the blue screen... it happened to me, on some Nvidia card, now is ok after i installed newer drivers.

[Syclone1]

have you tried also switching to static ram in the system rollout? I have a 1.5M poly scene Im working on here and it was rendering quite slow and giving me memory errors. I switched it to use the static ram and with Dynamic it was rendering about 35 to 40 min and after switching to static I have no memory errors atm (knock on wood) and the scene is rendering at about 10min per frame now

-dave

[Giovanni]

Lele,
the skydome with a sky map is only for background and for reflections. I do not use it for GI, or lighting.

I want to be able to control precisely the portion of sky visible from the different cameras in the scene, and I want the glass to reflect the sky, no matter what camera I am using.

I learned not to trust the map slots in the MAX and v-ray environment, unless to use HDR...but even then, tutorials and forums threads suggest to map the HDR ona a skydome, for maximum control.

Anyways, I thought turning the skydome into a proxy would improve RAM usage for the large map...But maybe vray proxy only optimize the geometry, and the maps are still loaded by max as per rgular geometry.

Bottom line, the damn scene still crashes, even with RAM available at about 120Mb (I took some geometry off, for testing)....Which is weird, because I thought that RAM shortage would crash MAX at lower levels (like, 10Mb left).

I will see if updating the drivers for the video card will allow me to use the 3gb switch...

Thank you

regards

gio

PS.: un sacco di italiani qua intorno... e bravi!

[s0real]

i know the 3gb switch will cause blue screen on certain systems (e.g. dell) without a hotfix from microsoft or installing sp2 for windows.

that's what i had to do anyway...

[studioDIM]

Lele,
the skydome with a sky map is only for background and for reflections. I do not use it for GI, or lighting.

I want to be able to control precisely the portion of sky visible from the different cameras in the scene, and I want the glass to reflect the sky, no matter what camera I am using.

I learned not to trust the map slots in the MAX and v-ray environment, unless to use HDR...but even then, tutorials and forums threads suggest to map the HDR ona a skydome, for maximum control.

I see where you come from, Giovanni, but to be honest i'd do one half setp more: once you're safe with your BG settings (with your image mapped onto the sphere) try and match the BG sphere rotation to the bitmap (VRayhdri or bitmap map) offset or rotation, and dump (hide, make not renderable) the sphere.
Something tells me that having a massive object bounding a scene is worst than having a map in a slot, but i may be wrong

Also, for background updates, if you set the viewport texture size to something small enough, and you map the "refresh background" key to something convenient (crtl+shift+alt+b is the default, i think ), you might do away entirely with the sphere trick.

Lele