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View Full Version : Speaking of the Renderer, why is it....?

PJC
01-28-2003, 04:35 PM
Why is the AM renderer such a memory hog?

It uses BSP trees. And it has to calculate those BSP trees before it renders anything. BSP trees calculate where all the objecs are, where the lights are and all that. You know. . . like game engines. This has the potential of making the renderer work really fast. . . as long as things aren't too complex. As soon as they get overly complicated, then that BSP tree that it creates can get really really really big, filling up your ram and causing your system to bog down as it hits the swap drive constantly.

Imagine how big a 30,000 PATCH quake level would be sitting in ram. . .

Eggslice gets around that problem by letting you slice up your shot into little bits. But its no miricle worker. . .
Wegg
01-28-2003, 04:43 PM
Aww crap. . . I hit "edit" instead of reply.

Sorry. :-(
PJC
01-28-2003, 07:13 PM
no prob about the edit (my god he answers his own questions!!).

I am a long time user of Eggslice, and it is cool, it's the only way I can get most of my comic images done (well, except that quad 'puter with 2GB of ram, that helps too!) and that's why I asked, especially after finishing a 6000 pixel image in Cinema 4D that was originally built in AM but wouldn't render due to RAM issues.

Is there any "white paper" or anything on the AM renderer out there?

- pjc
Nonproductive
01-28-2003, 07:33 PM
Not sure how it is in the current incarnation - but there was one version where I couldn't render anythnig substantial without runnnig one of those "memory cleaner" apps concurrently.

There seemed to be a huge memory leak that would eventually crash the machine if the memory app didn't clean up after the renderer.

It's not a cure all - but maybe it'd help some in whatever version you are using?
PJC
01-28-2003, 08:20 PM
most of my comic work (high-res) was done in 8.5p++ and it just used a lot of ram. I could render fine, it just used LOTS of ram.

The last big render I did was supposed to be in 9.5, but at the time 9.5 wouldn't even render ANY picture on my computer, so I used an alpha of v10 and it actually rendered and used A LOT less RAM than a similar image done in 8.5.

I've been playing with 9.51e and it DOES render now but haven't done any high-res tests as of yet.

- pjc
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