Vray not using available RAM

[3dgeek]

What's the deal with Vray's RAM consumption? No matter what I do I cannot get Vray to take more than a paltry 1gb-ish... certainly not the 8 gb I have available for it's use. I am running Max 2009 x64, Vray 1.5 SP2 x64, and of course XPx64 with 12 gb of RAM. The idea here is that I am hoping if Vray takes more RAM it might render faster? The scene is fairly complex and heavy.

I have "played" in the Raycaster params to try and get Vray to take more... and it seems to make very little difference.

Is there a way through the raycaster to speed this beast up? Thank you for your help, whoever you may be.

[rivoli]

what if the scene doesn't need more than 1 gig of memory to render? depending on what you're doing, there might be other settings to have a look at in order to speed things up

[3dgeek]

yeah, I am just at a loss at this point as to what I can tune to speed things up. Is 17-24 hours normal for a 2000px interior render lit mostly with indirect light? All materials subdivs are set to 8 or lower, I am using about 10 vray lights subdivs set to 8. There's allot of noise unless I really crank up the AA settings.

What's normal render times for interior images? Any tricks to speed things up?

Thanks again.

[dlparisi]

Using more ram won't necessarily speed things up, and I've never had a problem with vray not using every bit of ram available to it. The only slowdown I've seen from lack of ram is swapping out dynamic memory items such as proxies. As long as you CPU usage is ~100% memory is not your problem.

Can you post a screen shot of your settings (are you using IrrMap, LC, BF, etc?) and your render?

[rivoli]

interiors mainly lit by indirect light are tough for any renderer, it's very difficult to say what a reasonable render time should be.
a bit more info can help though: gi methods and settings, aa and settings, dmc and settings..

[3dgeek]

GI is IR set to low (preset) and the secondary is BruteForce (default settings) - obviously it speeds through this calculation... it seems to be the AA that is really killing me.... allot of blurry reflections... and tons of noise. Using Adaptive DMC 1-16, noise threshold in the sampler is set to .001. Lots of little details.

[dlparisi]

Personally I'd try Irrmap set to medium, but use light cache instead of BF - especcially if your trying to speed up the render. Check Use light cache for glossy, AA to DMC 1,6 and threshold to .005. If necessary you can check "detail Enhancement" in the IrrMap. This should get you going pretty quick.

[3dgeek]

Thanks allot for the help... testing right now to see if I can get some reasonable render times.

One other question... do you guys use allot of vray lights? How about Vray self illuminated materials? Do you use them together? Standard lights always seem to look so digital... vray lights are nice, but with many of them they tend to kill me on render times. I have no sunlight or anything in the scene... only vray lights and self illuminated materials. Essentially it is a theater environment.

[dlparisi]

It depends of course but I wouldn't say I don't use them due to rendering times. Interiors are usually a mix of sun, sky, vray lights and ies lights. If you're having trouble with self illuminated materials you can try wrapping vray lights set to light portals which should clean up shadows and gi from them.

[3dgeek]

So the "light portal" thing is useful even when there is no sun system? Should I change all of my vray lights to be portals? Would that help? Will they continue to illuminate and remain visible ect?

[dlparisi]

Just change the one's you put around the self illuminated material. Do a search for light portal and it should clear things up.

[jkletzien]

At the risk of stating the obvious...you have increased your dynamic memory limit to something like 6k?

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150S...ams_system.htm

[3dgeek]

I actually only tried bumping it to 2k... have you set it higher and had it use more?

Also, I really cannot seem to get rid of the noise in my image.... I am using the DMC and the settings are at 1-16, th noise threshold is .001 and the blurry reflections are totally fuzz.... What do I really have to put it at to get something smooth? This is ALWAYS my problem with DMC.... I usually resort to Adaptive Subdivision at very high levels to get things smooth.

Any thoughts?

[vlado]

What do your reflections look like now?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Dman3d]

If memory serves (no pun intended) but cant you turn off your paging all together in windows to force it to use more memory?
Seem to remember readin that somewhere.