Memory Usage

[M.Max]

Hi all
I'm trying to render a scene(large city ) on my 64 GB ram PC but unfortunately that's seems not enough and max keep crashing.
Is there any way to reduce the usage even though that would decrees rendering speed ?
I've tried already rendering with turning Default geometry to Dynamic and turning off Embree
scene have thousands of proxies and heavy usage of ForestPack And Railclone .
image is only ( 1k) and the memory is full before even stating the light cache calculation .
Any help would be highly appreciated

[Morbid Angel]

Hey M.Max,

Well on a heavy scene, if you use light cache, it has to load everything at once because it needs to calculate the lc for the entire scene. If its an exterior you could get away with using brute force.

The other thing is the textures, if you have a lot of maps, or high res maps they will eat some ram, you may want to look into making them tiled, that will certainly save some ram for you. Proxies are always dynamic, do you have reg geometry that might be consuming a large chunk of ram also? It could be rail clone also, since its parametric geometry, might not be dynamic (but its just a guess imo)

[M.Max]

Thanks Dmitry. these are some interesting ideas .
I will give BF+BF it a try even though I think it will be too costy for the animation but at least will have some frames to work on for now .
I think using lower res maps will help too here as it is eye-bird animation anyway .
almost all objects in the scene are proxies only the base ground and some small elements are regular geometry but will check that too .
I'm thinking of changing some settings under System rollout but I don;t know if it is worth it ,what do you think?

[Morbid Angel]

Here is the thing about proxy though, if you have a thousand unique proxies there is no point in having them, as you will run out of ram either way. Or if you reduce the dynamic memory to low it will render in something like 20-30 hours.

I would isolate what is causing the ram issue, usually could be one or two things. FP is usually pretty good for memory management, but if you put 100 million instances in it, then it will be heavy no matter what.

[M.Max]

Okay it might be as you said a problematic object casuing this issue as I have received this file in many parts from different people . so will check the scene and let you know what I will get.
Thanks again (y)

[Jiri.Matys]

Maybe set virtual memory on windows on a harddrive. Max wont crash on 64bit system and after LC is computed ram is unloaded so scene should fit in ram and render without any problem. Or buy more 64GB RAM

And Morbid Angel has right, look at your scene.

[M.Max]

I noticed that there is already some kind of caching happening on the hard drive too by default but that didn't stop the max from crashing.
At the end I have just added extra 64 GB ram and render start flying fast again =D
Thanks all !