CGTalk - out of memories

ywmang

07-30-2002, 01:44 AM

I've put 200 shadow mapping lights in a scene and it eats up my machine's memories so much that when the max is preparing the lights before the rendering stage, it starts to use swap disk for the memory purpose. I hear my harddisk keep roaring and my CPU usage drops to 40%. The rendering time simply increases dramatically whenever the physical RAM runs short.

So does anyone have tips to reduce the memory usage when there's a lot of shadow maps lights?

(my machine is a dual PIII with 1G Ram):shrug:

banzato

07-30-2002, 02:04 AM

Hello everybody im from Brasil and im very hapy to be in this site.
I dont know if this culd resolve your problem but it culd help. Try download cacheman from this site: http://www.outertech.com/
its good for performance, stability and memory in machines more than 512 RAM. bye

Ryan-B

07-30-2002, 02:07 AM

Reduce the size of the shadowmaps under "Shadow Map Params" in the light rollout.

Also, you can find out how much memory your lights are actually using with this macroscript: CALCULATE SHADOW MAP (http://www.ludd.luth.se/~strat/files/cwi_calc_shad.mcr) or CALCULATE SHADOW MAP 2 (http://www.scriptspot.com/scripts/web_upload/cwi_calc_shad.mcr)

Marcel

07-30-2002, 12:41 PM

If you are using omnis, switch to spotlights.

Omnis waste a lot of shadow map space (since they have shadows all around, like a sphere). Spotlights let you focus your shadows where you want.

The overshoot option makes the spotlight behave like a omni (casting light all around) but the shadow is only cast in the cone of the light. Very handy!

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