scene cache flushed

[floze]

It simply means that mentalray reached the memory limit you set in your globals, and the cache has been flushed by the amount it displays (204MB). It's nothing you have to be afraid of.

Your amount of physical RAM has no influence on this. Technically you have 4GB of maximum virtual memory that your 32bit machine can handle. On windows, 2GB of this is reserved for the operating system itself. The other 2GB are for you, unless you set the /3GB switch - then 3GB are for you, and 1GB for the operating system. So basically, to avoid unnecessary flushing, you should set your mentalray memory limit to 2GB minus 600MB = 1.4GB, because maya and all the other crap usually needs between 600MB to 1GB or more virtual memory, depending on your scene.

If you're using the /3GB switch, you might try 3GB - 600MB = 2.4GB memory limit. Maya/mentalray will either flush the cache (good) or crash (bad) if she/it exceeds this limit.

[GavinYoul]

yep, always problems trying to render highly detailed scenes or at a hi-res, raytracing, etc with maya. try cleaning up you scene, run render diagnostics, use cached texture files, reduce the size of your maps, delete unseen geometry.
i'm currently trying to reduce the render tile size so that the rendering job fits into ram. check out my thread 'render tile size' any ideas? the other thing you can do is render passes and render layers. this is what i've been doing although i don't recommend rendering layers as you create a lot of work for yourself later cleaning up the edges of overlapping objects when you composit. also keep your eye out for plugins that can render a section of the image at a time reducing memory demands enormously, you then join each section up in your paint program. i downloaded one recently from highend3d.com, but unfortunatly it didn't work with syntax errors, i'm back to square one with invalid flags!

hope you can get something out of this?

[mental]

Floze, I believe the 3GB switch only applies to systems running XP

[Marlboro-Man]

man...thanks guys,

U guys are so awesome and willing to help. Will try what you suggested!

Thanks and off to subdivision level 4!

REgards,

Marlboro-Man

[floze]

Floze, I believe the 3GB switch only applies to systems running XP
Yep, you're right. I thought Windows 2000 supports it as well, but apparently it's exclusively working on XP Professional and on the Windows Server editions from NT Server 4.0 up.

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