render all scenes?

[edonk]

Re: render all scenes?

What do mean by "a lot of textures"? Do you mean actual numbers or diffuse map size?

I just had a quick check and the most individual textures I have in a skp file is 58 (I clean, purge and reapply textures like a crazy person, especially if using anyone elses' components), but I frequently use HUGE diffuse, bump, environment and reflection maps up to 15000 x 7500 pixels which are a major memory drain, but so far, apart from parsing slower they haven't brought VRay or my old laptop to it's knees.... yet.

How is your paging file set up?

Hmm Jackson your response has me intrigued.. I'm having to render out as a vrimage file because I just cant get a file bigger than 2500 pixels wide out of my current model. Its got 24 individual Vray materials in it and I actually downsampled ALL the textures in the model to around 400k each from 2-3MB high res textures just to see if it worked. It got the base model down from 50MB to around 15MB. It did get about half way thru the 4th pass before running out of memory. My clients usually ask for 3000px wide renders, so if I can get this issue resolved it would be great. Having to convert the files is becoming a pain.
In regards to your page file question, do you mean within Vray or Windows? I'm running quite a high spec machine, so I presumed it had something to do with Sketchups own limitations.
Any help would be greatly appreciated here.

[thomthom]

Re: render all scenes?

Sounds like it's something with your setup or matchine - I got no problems with such scenes either.

Do you use a lot of displacement?

[edonk]

Re: render all scenes?

The only displacement I use is on roof tile textures, everything else is bump maps.
I'll rerun the scenes without displacement to see if that resolves the issue.

[edonk]

Re: render all scenes?

Well that's weird, I disabled the displacement map on the roof tiles and the model now renders out at any resolution I want!
Any ideas why the displacement is causing memory problems?

[thomthom]

Re: render all scenes?

Because it needs to generate ALOT of extra geometry. Are the roof displacement many large faces. V-Ray need to keep in memory the displaced geometry of the whole face before it can proceed. It might work better if you split the faces into smaller faces - allowing V-Ray to process smaller chunks at a time.

And it also depends on what your Displacement settings are. How finely grained it is.

Basically - only use displacement when you really need it. And don't displace too large faces.

[remon_v]

Re: render all scenes?

maybe increase the edge lenght and lower the disp subdivs

[edonk]

Re: render all scenes?

Thanks ThomThom, thats a great help. The roof faces on this particular model are massive, so that probably explains my problem. Man, I spent hours downsizing all the textures yesterday aswell :'(
Are there any Ruby Sripts out there for quickly splitting faces into smaller sizes?

[thomthom]

Re: render all scenes?

hm... you could try the Add Detail function of Sandbox tool...

[Jackson_cg]

Re: render all scenes?

Edonk,

Glad you're working towards a solution for your memory problems- most of my newer SU/VfSU models are easily running upwards of 50Mb due, in part, to me increasingly making higher poly-geometry, but mostly as I'm using much higher res diffuse maps than I used to. When I was creating diffuse maps I stupidly used to stay within SU/OpenGL's 1024 px limit, but as soon as I realised that VRay will process any size of difuse map I've been slowly updating my texture bitmap library with much higher res images.

As I haven't run into memory problems and don't use displacement much (I can't be doing with the render times) I guess that is the culprit in your case. I've wondered for a while if it's more of a memory hit to render actual modelled geometry or to use displacement for simpler geometry like roof tiles? The question is how much of a memory hit is it for VRay to generate the displaced geometry compared to parsing actual geometry.... I'm very intrigued. If your CPU and graphics card are top-notch (I just read amazing claims about i7 and SU performance on SCF from a very reputable source) and thus able to cope with very high-poly skp files maybe it's best to model them?

That said, I have rendered very large single areas of displacement grass in tests (50 meters x 50 metres) and other than taking a long time to render I haven't had any memory problems with that either (though they were only 1400 x 800 px and your problems are obviously only evident at much higher resolutions).

By "paging file" I was referring to XP's "virtual memory" function for dynamically freeing up RAM by caching lower priority data to a harddrive.

If you're running XP:

Right-click "My Computer">"Advanced" tab>"Settings" button in the "Performance" section>New Window>"Advanced" tab>"Change" button in "Virtual Memory" section. At this point I have read many different opinions (most of which claim to be absolutely and exclusively authoratitive) about what the ideal paging file settinsg are, but I've messed around with it a lot over the years and have come to the conclusion that the first guy who advised me had it about right.

Choose an HDD for your paging file (ideally more than one if you have multiple internal HDDs) and choose "Custom". Now instead of XP's default dynamic paging file (i.e. different Inital and Max sizes) size set them to the same figure- I have mine at approximately 2.5 x my actual RAM, so with 1.5Gb RAM I have a paging file of 4000Mb. I am by no means a hardware or OS whizz, but the logic behind this was explained to me that having a dynamic paging file your system is actually having to use processing power to change the size of the paging file whereas a fixed size negates this. I don't know if this is correct or fantasy, but I've been running my system (and my previous PC) this way for years and it seems to work very well. When I added a second internal HDD to my laptop I added a paging file it too.

As much as it would be nice to think that Microsoft ship out their OS with the best possible settings for maximum performance, I quickly realised that they "tune" it for the average Joe sat at his desk playing with Word, IE and iTunes not for folks running extremely high-spec machines and rendering at 100% CPU Usage for 8 hours a night and Photoshop, SU, VRay and God-knows-what all open simultaneously.

BTW, the reason I found out about this in the first place was because I bought Vue d'Esprit a few years ago and it was extremely unstable on my then-brand-new XP laptop- crashing really badly every time I rendered, corrupting files and losing loads of work in the process. Combining the large static paging file tip with frequent defragging and regularly running Registry Mechanic all my Vue problems were instantly fixed so I've pretty much stuck with this setup ever since.

[edonk]

Re: render all scenes?

Jackson, thanks for your indepth response it has been useful. I do have an i7 machine and its been a joy to use so far. Obviously I was pretty gutted when I started getting memory errors within Vray as I've used other render engines with no problems before. Thanks to you and ThomThom that issue is now resolved. Displacement is a pretty sweet effect, but I'm not sure the 2GB memory limitation makes it a viable option at the moment. Anyway, since removing the displacement in that model, it renders like a dream. I just cant beleive the quality that Vray can produce in such a short amount of time. I'm just peeved that I downsampled all my textures, and no didnt keep copies of the originals, DOH!
In regards to paging files, I'm pretty much computer savvy so I already have 26GB available for the paging file, I wondered if there were some settings within Vray that I could play with when you made that post. I've been so busy recently I havent even read thru the Vray manual properly, something I will definately do as soon as I have a few hours spare.
In the meantime, thanks very much for all your help.

[Jackson_cg]

Re: render all scenes?

In regards to paging files, I'm pretty much computer savvy so I already have 26GB available for the paging file

I suspected you were, but thought I'd just explain it anyway as someone else could maybe benefit from this tip.

I'm just peeved that I downsampled all my textures, and no I didnt keep copies of the originals, DOH!

Damn... that's not fun. :'(

[40th]

Re: render all scenes?

@Jackson
I'm interested in that "paging file" tip
There are two fields:
1) Initial size - is 2046 MB, as my RAM memory.
2) Maximum size - 4092

That's the C: Drive, the D: Drive has none.

Please tell me if i understood this right? This gives me RAM memory, only it stores on the hard drive instead?

[Jackson_cg]

Re: render all scenes?

Yep, there's not much more to it than that. If you follow my setup (which is by no means guaranteed, but has worked well for me for years) you would change both the Initial and Maximum Paging File size to approx 2.5 times your actual RAM, so that'd be 5000Mb. Add the same sized paging file to your D: drive. I once read that you should always have your paging file on your secondary drive (the one which you OS isn't installed on), but when I did it seemed like Photoshop started running into memory problems (always hard to tell though, I may have just been working on heavier files that week). So I added an identical paging file to both drives and things seem to be running pretty well.

This gives me RAM memory, only it stores on the hard drive instead?

Not quite- it temporarily moves low priority data already stored on your RAM onto your HDD instead (and then of course loads it back into your RAM when required). It probably won't result in any processing speed increase (as reading and writing to HDD is many many times slower than to RAM), but getting the settings right can make working in memory intensive progs like renderers and Photoshop a lot easier, and perhaps more stable. Of course for this to work properly it is imperative that you keep 5Gb free at the very least on each of your drives. Of course you really shouldn't ever your primary drive more than 2/3 full- otherwise it's time to clone a new, bigger primary drive. I've had a couple of friends complain that their PCs were running slow or unstable and on checking their primary drive I found one only had about 6Gb free, the other less than 1Gb!
It's like filling your car with bricks and then wondering why it doesn't accelerate or handle as well as it used to. LOL

[40th]

Re: render all scenes?

Thanks for the explanation.
I'm upgrading now from 2GB to 6GB RAM. Do you think this set-up will be unnecessary when i upgrade?

[Jackson_cg]

Re: render all scenes?

Unlikely- as I understand it you always need a paging file set according to the amount of physical RAM you have.

That said, if you're talking about upgrading to 6GB RAM then you must be running Vista or Windows 7 beta? Everything I've described above relates to 32bit XP- I have zero experience of any other Operating Systems.