Vray 2.0: Excessive RAM usage

[SteveC]

Hi All,

Is the excessive use of ram still an issue with Vray build 2.20.02 ? I have a scene that just won't render
after 2 days of trying to sort it out. The file size is only 163MB and it's the parked cars from a bigger scene,
that I also couldn't get to render. I would say that a third of the cars are original geometry and the rest
are instanced.

I set the render going and at the updating instances part the memory usage is 2.5GB, at the comping geometry
stage it jumps to over 7GB then max just closes down.

I'm using Max 2012 64bit on windows 7, I have Dynamic Memory set to 12000MB. Any help would be much
appreciated as I'm starting to pull my hair out now.

cheers
Steve

[vlado]

Is the excessive use of ram still an issue with Vray build 2.20.02?

It was fine in my tests. If you still have issues, can you get me the scene to vlado@chaosgroup.com?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Fredrik Averpil]

Hey Vlado, I'm experiencing severe RAM leaks during the static raycast acceleration phase and the render never moves on. The scene is not that complex. I'm not sure if this is related to this thread... I'm using the latest nightly (June 26th, 2013). Should I email the scene to you directly?

[Fredrik Averpil]

Turns out there were, well probably hundreds, of useless render elements in my scene and I was trying to render a very high res still image.

The bogus render elements seem to have been somehow registered when importing a bunch of references. When looking in the VFB render elements dropdown there are multiple (and therefore redundant) elements of the same type, e.g. lighting, GI etc.

This must have caused V-Ray to start allocate memory for all these high res EXR files which the VFB was supposed to hold in memory - or something like that... and my RAM peaked (at 24 GB) even before the VFB showed up in Maya. After having removed all of these bogus render elemens, the scene totalled out at 7 GB RAM and renders fine.

I'm not sure if there is ever a reason why one would want multiple render layers of the same type (except multimatte, materialID, extraTex, objectID, customColor, lightSelect and perhaps some other types of render elements which I have forgotten). Could it be wise to perhaps prohibit V-Ray for Maya to never try and register redundant ones (diffuse, lighting, GI etc) if they already are registered?

[svetlozar.draganov]

Thank you very much for your feedback.
I'll add feature-request about dismissing render elements that had been already added.