Running out of RAM - Batch Rendering

[footers]

Hi, sorry about the longish message,

I'm batch rendering a scene of about 300 frames, each frame producing a TGA of about 2.5mb, nothing huge and it will perform about 20 frames then just grind. I've looked into further and have noticed it is just running out of RAM, or more accurately it's not freeing up the RAM it's used.
I'm running a dual xeon 2.8 with 1gb RAM.
When the machine is grinding Maya's only using about 250mb RAM, with no other hungry processes running but it still says I only have 5mb RAM free!!!
I've noticed this outside of rendering aswell, Maya can be open but doing nothing and yet my system is still using 500mb RAM.

I've had the system for a year or so and have only just noticed the problem.
Is it Maya or is it my system?
Can you improve the settings within Maya to free up memory?

Many Thanks in advance

[joojaa]

A relatively empty maya can easily use 500 megs of memory tough, once youve loaded a few scripts/plugs in memory (thisiswhy you dont want to just ennable all plugs all the time)! Altough some users running maya 6.0 and 6.01 have reported memory leaks, in maya especialy on linux and some on windows.

Altough to be honest loading all maya plugs i have and modelling for a while never brings my maya over 500 megs. But maybe you have unlimitted undo on! Also bulding a poly object without ever flushing old history away can in about 30 minutes of working eat a gigabyte of memory easily.

what build of maya are you running (save as a ascii filer and read the header using wordpad or whatever editor)

Altough i cant verify this as i dont have the problem.

The batchrenderer does indeed have a problem sometimes wit dissallocating memory (this is nothing new, its a standard render problem), or rather its the fact that it tries to recycle things without hope of doing so. so you should allways run it form a commandline to save you memory of launching a full maya, and then run it inside a for loop that restarts the process every 20 frames or so thereby flushing the mem.

It is impossible to foresee such occourences however, so this is on of the major reasons no one ever renders anything out to avis. Its just not maya that has theese kinds of problems but all renderers are prone to this if misconfigured or mistreatted. Infact its rether easy to have most renderers to leak, a bit. With the possible exception of those renderers that launch a new process for every frame (this is actualy smart on the long run).

also try disabling reuse tesselations.

[footers]

Thanks for the reply.
It all makes quite alot of sense. It was just confusing me because I was rendering the same (complex) scene with a lower tessellation a few days ago and it never had this problem. I haven't deleted the history for a while though, so it could be causing a problem.
Also I haven't had the experience of running the batch renderer through a loop, but sounds like a nice idea. I'll have to find out how to do it!! I'm running that render on unlim 6. I also have another machine I could run it through complete 5.
Any idea if this will help?
The scene has nothing in it that needs unlim, it will run in complete. What's the best way to get the scene into 5.

Thanks

[joojaa]

If you have maya unlimitted you can instal render only nodes on as many achines you want.

[sparky]

joojaa

how do you run it inside for a loop to flush the memory ever 20 frames?

thanks
f

[joojaa]

http://www.highend3d.com/boards/showthread...amp;Main=170607

too tired to repeat myself...

[sparky]

thanks.

I appreciate the time you take to answer, sometimes inane, questions.

f

[gmask]

When he said run it in a loop he meant liek a shell script.. I think you can do this on windows as well but off hand I don't know the syntax..

basically you would create a little sscript that would issue a command to render 20 frames and then when that's done it would render another 20.

Or you could simply create a bat file that had one render command after another that broke your render up into similar segments.

Or you could download smedge and let it do it for you.

[joojaa]

my link contains one example of such a script. I was just lazy not wanting to paste it around (i picked the link form serch directly)

[gmask]

Ah.. I didn't bother to click it.. i could see where that line of code might be a bit intimidating for a newbie.

so let's break it down shall we..

for /L %a in (0,20,170) DO for /F %b in ('set /a %a+19') do render -s%a -e%b file.ma/mb

(0,20,170)
0 is your start frame
20 is the number of frames to render at a time
170 is the last frame

render -s%a -e%b file.ma/mb

This is your render command string

%a and %b are variable set by the script

otherwise you add any other flags you need to this string

file.ma/mb allows to the script to find the scene name regardless of which suffixs it ends with.. I woudl say most of the time you would not need this.. as I usually use one or the other and on the rare occasion both.

any questions?

[jenny-07-1]

Joojaa...I'm pretty sure that the support of multiple (or even unlimited) render nodes doesn't just apply to Maya Unlimited, but to Maya Complete as well...

[joojaa]

Im not sure about this i cant find any info on this at the alias site, but I know the unlimitted has as many as you want so theres no question about it from his point of view.

Alteast whan they started to lax theese lic3ence things unlimitted had as many as you liked and complete had a few extra.

Anyway im not that intersted in the subject (i use renderman pro server, and mentalray standalone)