Proxies and Ram

[BBB3]

Hi guys, I've been having issues lately to do with proxies and what I believe is a ram issue, although it mainly manifests itself through low CPU utilisation.

Whenever I want to render a very simple proxy (just a patch of grass, not a multi-million poly tree), a few thousand times, my comp slows down hugely, memory consumption shoots up, and CPU usage drop to 15-35%. If I want to render the proxy, say, 100,000 times, I max my ram (8Gb and dynamic memory set to the highest possible level in my Vray settings) and things just stop working, forcing me to force-crash my rig. The funny thing is that CPU utilisation starts dropping long before I reach the 8GB. I have a scene cooking right now at 35% CPU with only 5,19GB in use (Max uses 3GB).

Utilisation is worst when calculating the IM (of course, no light cache in these situations) and better when actually rendering.

This is annoying in itself, but in addition, it makes my brand new copy of Vrayscatter worthless. Only thing I can populate a landscape with is teapots (and even teapots will crash my system if there are enough of them).

Is it possible that a large number of relatively simple proxies should be so memory hungry? I thought proxies could be scaled hugely efficiently...

Or is 8GB a joke these days?

[peterguthrie]

strange that teapots don't work. I once had a problem with grass due to a badly made vrayproxy (all grass strandsused to make the proxy were instances - vray really didnt like that for some reason) where the memory usage went ballistic.

[BBB3]

I might have made this mistake too on some of the proxies I'm using. I'll check. But this doesn't explain the limitations I'm having with unique objects. It's weird because the memory usage really seems to be rising proportionally to the number of proxies. It's almost as though they were being copied instead of instanced. My impression (which might be wrong), was that the memory footprint of rendering 1,000 times the same proxy should not be much lower than when rendering it 500,000 times - since it's the same mesh...

[Mikokariadis]

Had that problem once where I only got a limited number of proxies to render. Mostly grass, trunks, branches, other tree parts in general.

Started over and it just worked. No memory limiting happened second time around. I did feel like the first time it was a problem with proxy objects using up way too much ram...but the second version had more of them in it and all rendered well.

Though have to say that file had been given out and it did have some problems with some CAD objects imported to it by a third party.

[BBB3]

Peter's solution seems to have partly solved my problems. I rebuilt some of the proxies that were giving me trouble and now I get full CPU power during the rendering phase, although the LC and IR calculations still use just about 30 per cent of CPU. So it's gone from a major roadblock to a mild annoyance.