Dynamic memory limit?

[UBIKmh]

Is there a reason why the dynamic memory setting is limited to 4 gig?
I have 8 gig in my computer and wanted to up the dym mem to 6, but Vray 1.5 rc3 refused to do that. I have max 9 rc 3 on a dual quad.

Marc

[vlado]

Because there were no 64-bit machines when the option was created This is corrected already, but you can easily set it to any value through MaxScript.

Best regards,
Vlado

[glorybound]

memory

any rule of thumb here? Is it like Windows Page File? Should this be set to twice the available ram?

[vlado]

You should probably set it somewhat lower than the amount of physical RAM in your machine, but this also depends on how much RAM is needed by the other parts of the scene. Ideally, everything should fit inside the physical RAM. If you set it higher, and Windows starts paging to disk, performance will fall drastically.

Best regards,
Vlado

[glorybound]

memory

Is leaving it at the default 400Mb ok, or should it be cranked up? I have 4Gb of RAM so what would be optimal?

[DaForce]

Depends on the scene Bobby.

Use it as a last resort as it will slow your renders a fair bit 5-20%
If you can render the scene without it then dont use it. (dynamic memory that is) try stick with static as long as possible.

If you are raising it for some dynamic objects in your scene, well then it dpends on how much of the scene they take up.. if its a tree in the BG thats a proxy but the rest of the scene is just mesh then your dynamic memory limit should be low.

If you have lots of proxied trees and displaced grass I would set it to about 1/2 - 3/4 of your ram.

I often set to 1400MB of my available 2GB

[UBIKmh]

Well my scene refuses to render with the 4 gig limit, so I would like to know how to fix this. Does installing rc 4 fix this? Or do get a lot more problem going from 3 to 4.

If I can fix this with maxscript, please tell me how. I never work with maxscript. I have no clue how to do this.

Marc

[UBIKmh]

OK, installing rc 4 does not do the trick.

Please advise.

Marc

[DaForce]

Well it depends at what point the render crashes. I assume you are using 64bit windows and max/vray.

Then the render should not crash until it sucks up all your memory.
Is it doing that?

If not, then how much memory is it using when it crashes and is there anything in the vray log?

[ene.xis]

a little more info would help...u!

are using proxies?

[UBIKmh]

OK, more info.

First I converted the scene and made all the trees proxies. Originaly it's a max 6 scene. I did that last week for some different scenes to do animations, worked fine.
So after I had all the proxies inplace I hit the render button and it crashed, kept crashing no matter what inventive changes I did. Then, by mistake I openened the version where all the trees where still instances and to my surprise that scene rendered. Barrely, used 4 gig, but it rendered. I simplified the scene some more, and last night my computer rendered the irr and lc for an animation path (every 10th frame). This morning I wanted to start a computer to render the animation, but it crashed. It doesn't appear to crash because it runs out of memory. It loads everything, but when the buckets appear it crashes. I'm sure it's a memoty issue, because simplifying the scene some more, xreffing parts of the scene, simplifying trees, reducing map sizes, etc etc. It crashed later, but still crashed. Then I reduced the bucket size to 32 (instead of 64) and it even rendered a few buckets. So it clearly appears to be a memory problem. It also helps if I render from bottom to top instead of from top to bottom. There is hardly any geometry at the bottom of the render and a lot at the top. That also indicates a problem with memory to load objects.

Please correct me if I'm wrong in my thinking.

Marc

[DaForce]

Ok, a few questions.

How did you proxy the trees?
Did you just select them all and make one big proxy or did you make a few proxies.. one for each variety and then instance them around the map?
Unless you have a massive amount of trees it would be faster to render with them NOT as proxies.

Are you using any displacement?

And since its not been confirmed, I assume your using 64bit everything, and with 8GB of ram you should see any memory related crashes until you hit 8GB memory usage for 3dsmax.exe.

[UBIKmh]

More trouble at the mill.

I installed rc 4 and now everytime I change my settings they revert back to standard when I save the file. Might I be having the demo? Probably, going back to rc 3 will resolve it again I hope.

Marc

[UBIKmh]

I proxied every type of tree (5 in total) and then instanced the proxy in the scene to create a lot of trees. I rotate and scale the seperate instances to make them look different. In total the scene has 5 trees, each of them instaced in different amounts to simulate about 250 trees.


Marc

[UBIKmh]

Oh, displacement is allready set to off. I gave up on that.

Marc