How do I avoid low memory errors while rendering

[zuan]

My scene has 1.8 million faces. I am trying to render, but when it gets to the areas that are most dense to render, the render cancels and throws me a low memory error. Is there a render setting I can use that will use my windows paging filefor the extra memory instead of just the RAM? I am running 1GB of RAM at the moment. I know that if it was to use the paging file, rendering would run alot slower, but I just want to be able to render the frame. I did use displacement maps, but I later converted the displacement maps to polygons. That is why poly counts are so high. Like I said, I want to just be able to render the frame. I don't care how long it takes.

[gmask]

Did you set windows to use more disk caching.. my_computer->Properties->Advanced->Performance

I 'm also assuming that you do not have anything else open when rendering right?

[deke-kincaid]

Do you have lots of texture maps, or lots of large shadow maps in the scene? They tend to suck up more ram then lots of geometry. Turn your texture maps into BOT files and try lowering the resolution on the shadow maps, or precompute any static shadow maps.

[zuan]

No shadow maps. The most complex shader network in my scene is the one for my cars blurred reflection. But the memory errors didn't start until I made the tires. All f tires and rims contain 1.6 million faces viewable and the car is the extra 0.2 million. I did increase the paging file, but in the windows task manager, it is only showing Maya using the RAM instead of the total available memory.

I have 11GB of space allocated for paging. I just need Maya to use them. It is only using the 1GB available in my RAM.

[jugdish]

Do you have "Use File Cache" checked on in the Render Globals? If so, Maya is doing it's own swapping. You should be noticing MS.# files appearing in whatever directory your TEMP or TMPDIR environment variable is set; these are the cache files. (I'm assuming you're using Windows).

Anyway, try turning that off...

• Matthew Durante

[zuan]

Ok. I tried disabling file caching, and the used memory got up to about 1.2 GB. I have 11GB reserved for paging. I still got the error. I really need to try and figure this out. I have tried freeing up so much, and it isn't using it all.

The error is as follows:

// Error: An error has occurred. Rendering aborted. //
// Error: An exception has occurred, rendering aborted. //
// Error: An exception has occurred, rendering aborted. //
// Error: Free memory is low. Memory exception thrown //

I have 1 GB of RAM and 10 GB of allocated paging file space in windows.

[gmask]

Anybody know what Maya's limit on faces is? 1.8 mill sounds like it may be too many?

Here's a wild guess try chopping the model into two pieces. Or try render the image in quadrqants rather than one whole image at once?

Are you raytracing?

[deke-kincaid]

I have 11GB reserved for paging. I still got the error. I really need to try and figure this out. I have tried freeing up so much, and it isn't using it all.

Pretty much you are running out of ram for that scene. What resolution are you rendering at? I would try rendering in iff/sgi because it uses less ram for that. 32 bit operating systems can only allocate around 1.6-2 gig of ram/or swap to any single application, so a 11gig page file is pretty worthless unless you are trying to run 5 applications at the same time that all use 2 gig of ram each.

Not sure if it is an option, but maya on #nix: linux uses about 1/4th the ram that it does on windows. Much more efficient at most things in the rendering side of things. So it will take alot more to reach that 1.6 gig ram limit.

[joojaa]

i think (note im not 100% sure) a page fault is caused by swapping too since the requested data takes too long to retrieve wich means maya looses precious computation time so it would indeed often do a page fault when paging. In a sense the paging faults is a meter on how effectively maya used the processor.

Bot files could alleviate the problem a bit tough (because maya can account the time for retrieval and do seomething else during the time)