Memory Management

[Crode]

have you removed anything thats totally hidden? Things outside the view of the camera? If your using DOF, simplify the things that will be blurry anyways.

As long as your using windows (after making sure you have nothing else loaded into memory) theres not much you can do besides adding more ram. Though those SCSI drives should have sweet speed for a swap file. .... Check to make sure your swap files are on a seperate hard drive, instead of your windows system drive.

Possibly rendering in layers would speed things up

by the way whats HRSG?

[brianellebracht]

Thanks for the info, I didn't think about checking on the swap files. What is an HRSG. Nothing to impressinve, its short for Heat Recovery Steam Generator. Theye are used for Powerplants to take water and convert it to Steam to turn a turbine, like a really really big radiator, but does the opposite. If you go to,

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=26473

YOu can see some images I have alllready rendered, but they are only bits and pieces of the animation, and are only parts of the complete model.
Thanks,
Brian

[tuna]

have you tried using MR for this?

it might be able to handle memory better.. worth a shot if the SWAP doesnt come out good.

(though it might be a tad slower than the default)

[brianellebracht]

You really think MR Would be better? Haven't tried it yet (although we do have it here) I assumed that it would take even longer because of the scene size and all of the geometry. Either way, its only taking about a min at the most to render a frame, but this animation is going to be 12-15 min long, and Render time ads up. If you think that MR might actully work, Better, then I will give it a shot. Thanks for your help,
Brian

[plotz]

I do a lot of work with engine assemblies that balloon up to the million poly mark if I don't work on them first.

One thing that helps me quite a bit is to re-work the geomtry for display purposes.

All the CAD data I get is literally too "thick". Cylinders and engine blocks all have inner and outer walls in their IGES form. But when I render I'm only going to see the outer wall. Removing all the hidden inner surfaces will often cut the overall poly count almost in half.

Another thing that helps is to tesselate the objects separately. For instance I break out all the long cylindrical objects and use one setting on them, and a different one on all the squarish objects. And always do the small stuff, bolts, screws, etc. separately, because you can usally decimate it pretty heavily and nobody will notice.

I don't know how much of this applies to what you're doing, but it's helped me tremendously. I still work on a modest PIII system, and I'm able to get the job done.

[brianellebracht]

Thanks alot for the info. I am in the exact same situation with Iges Creating alot of unneeded geometry. I am also starting to go thru and delete some of this geometry, but it is a little tedious. I have also started to mess with the tess. as well, but I still have alot more to go. THanks for your help, I will let you know how it turns out. By the way, witch cad program do you use to export? I use Microstation...
Thanks,
Brian

[plotz]

Most of the stuff I work with comes out of IDEAS. I don't touch the CAD programs, the engineers at the clients site export them and send them to me.

I use Rhino to pre-process the IGES files. It's got a much faster importer than Maya, and it's got some tools that make picking the assemblies apart much easier.

One Rhino plug I can't live without is called BPSelect. It allows you to select objects based on their color. This allows me to work with the CAD guys to color things so I can easily separate them into layers and nuke out the junk I don't need.

It still leaves a lot of surfaces, but I group those in Rhino, and export as OBJ for use in Maya.

I don't know if Maya has some of these capabilites or not. I started using Rhino when a test IGES file took 20 minutes to read into Maya, and 2 minutes to read into Rhino:)

[noisewar]

What about instancing? Looks like you have alot of the same kind of surfaces.

[brianellebracht]

Does instacing really make that much of a difference?
Thans,
Brian

[plotz]

I don't think instancing would help in this situation. The biggest value of instancing would be that if you changed one object, they'd all change.

Instances still have to be displayed, and still have to be rendered.

[noisewar]

well try it yourself. I've found it works great for lowering memory use, but it's true that it will still eat up processor time to display. open up your windows processes list and try duplicating a polysphere 1000 times with copy versus instance. you should see significant memory savings.

[brianellebracht]

sorry I am replying so late, but thanks for the info... Hmm... now to decide wether or not i want to go back and redo all of the geomety I have created. LOl. THanks alot for your help guys,
Brian

[plotz]

"I've found it works great for lowering memory use..."

I see what you're saying, and agree with you there. I was thinking in terms of display and rendering tasks only. I forgot he was trying to free up memory.

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