Hi all
Just working on a scene that I wanted to include some animated 3DS Max cameras. This is so I could have more control of both the camera path and the target. The vrscene without exported animation loads in Vantage, but exceeds the available VRAM when the animated cameras are included. It would seem I was close to using up my VRAM (24Gb) with the non-animation export, but the cameras pushed it over the edge. My Task Manager Performance tab shows 19.9 of 24Gb allocated when the non-animation scene loaded.
The Vrscene file with animation was about 20Mb higher in size than the non-animation export and crashed Vantage. I’m just curious as to why this would be the case. Should camera transform data take up a lot of VRAM?
More broadly - I’d appreciate any tips/advice for dealing with scenes that exceed VRAM. Typically I perform a resource collection of all the texture bitmaps used in the scene. I then resample the larger ones down, and hope for the best.
Are you sending this as a stand alone file to Vantage? If so, have you got any animated meshes in the scene, 24 Gb ram is pretty heavy, I work with mega projects here and they rarely stray over 15-20Gb?
Regarding the animated cameras my best method is to avoid exporting these alongside the general file and save them separately via the .vrscene export under the V-Ray menu, ensure you’ve only selected the cameras first, when in the .vrscene exporter dialog then ensure you click under Options Export selected only and under Animation Export animation. Once you’ve saved these separately then import them into Vantage.
If you are using the latest version of Vantage, you can see Mesh and Texture memory usage stats from the File menu. This could give you some idea about what most of those 20GB are spent on. The output buffers could also take up gigabytes if your render resolution is large and/or if there are lots of render elements.
Resampling textures probably doesn’t change usage much when the Dynamic Textures option is enabled (it is on by default) because we generate mip-maps in this case and only load the level that is needed on the gpu.
Does your scene use displacement? This could consume a lot of memory. If you have displacement try reducing the tessellation amount from Edit->Preferences->Render Defaults.
Hey Jason - thanks for the camera importing tips there - appreciate it. I’m exporting a Vrscene file to Vantage rather than Live-Link. Not using any animated meshes or displacement. I seem to run out of VRAM quite often, so I’m obviously doing something wrong compared to your projects.
Will look into it. Thanks Jason and Nikola
As Nikola mentioned you can also check the texture and mesh Vram in Vantage, spot the trouble makers.
In 3dsmax you can use a good plugin by Pixamoon that tracks bitmaps and allows for resizing as well. I think it’s about $30 dollars, well worth it as 3dsmax itself never gets any updates in this core management area.
Also, if you can get into the habit of checking all models that you import into 3dsmax and resize the maps as 2k .jpgs that will also help. you’ll find lots of 8k .tif files amongst some of the 3dsky models.
If you don’t have Pixamoon but do have access to Adobe Bridge then you can also resize images easily.
Thanks again for your help Jason. Will look at that Pixamoon app.
There were a handful of 8K textures lurking in my scene, and it didn’t help that I had the original 3DS Max file open in the background, which was chewing up a fair bit of VRAM to begin with.