Struggling with Large Scene - C4D Memory Issues?

[woodface]

Hi CGarchitects.

 

I posted a while back about my schorlarship/competition project and was advised to use C4D. I have been using it in conjunction with sketch and toon and Xfrog, struggling because I am coming from a more CAD/Rhino3d direction and this is a big change of style.

 

My deadline is coming up VERY shortly, and I am running into problems with my model. I'm starting to panic!

 

I have modelled an electricity pylon to a high level of detail, and then used Xfrog to create artificial plants that grow in and around it. I have also modelled my own pylon design and with similar artificial plants. I am trying to put 7 of my pylon and 13 of the electricity pylon into my site model.

 

But cinema is displaying an 'Out of Memory' message after just two insertions.

 

I noticed that Cinema starts to do that and become unstable/crash when it reaches about 1.2gb of memory used. What can I do to get around this?

 

My viewports have also been freezing up - when I used boolean object and at other points. The only way to unfreeze the viewport is to undo whatever action caused it to freeze. Unfortuneately I saved after one of these actions and had to revert to a previous file version to recover my work. Any help with this?

 

I'm going crazy here! Your help is much appreciated.

[edub]

not an expert on memory issues, but booleans tend to bog down the system a lot. Is there a reason you're not making them editable (converting to plain polygons)? It's fine to have booleans up to a certain point in the design, but once you're fairly certain you won't be changing the geometry you can clear up some RAM by converting them.

 

Same goes for other "generators", I'd imagine.

 

Without really seeing an example of your model, it's hard to put a finger on the cause of your problem.

[manta]

Is there anyway you can start using the 64bit version, that would solve your problems...

[woodface]

Is there anyway you can start using the 64bit version, that would solve your problems...

 

Ok - I've got rid of booleans, and I won't use other generators. My strategy is position the detailed pylon in a single location, render, then move it and render again and so on. I should be able to put them together in photoshop. Its pretty laborious, but I can't think of anything else - memory usage shoots up so quickly.

 

I wish I could go 64bit, but I am running 32bit Windows.... The next machine I get will be 64bit, running 64bit windows with 8GB of RAM. My machine always seems to let me down like this when things get critical.

[jackb602]

How many polygons is your scene? What about each pylon, or each plant? Xfrog is a great tool for realistic plants, but it can easily create very large models. There are a number of ways to simplify them, especially if the plants won't be seen up close.

 

Also, converting any Xfrog plants to polygons will make it much easier for Cinema to handle the file. When I'm fine tuning a tree for example, I will do that in a separate empty file, and then convert it to polys and copy it into the main file.

 

Another solution is to just buy more RAM. It's pretty cheap these days.

[Frosty]

One word. INSTANCES

Make sure your original pylon is as optimized as possible and then use instances to create the duplicates. There is no need to add the extra geometry.

[Ernest Burden III]

One word. INSTANCES

 

When I had a problem with a massive model not rendering on any but a 2GB machine, I was advised by some of the knowledgeable people on CGtalk to explode all instances (I had hundreds upon hundreds of them) before rendering (save a copy for this) and connect all polygons with the same materials. It helped. But you wouldn't want to work that way normally, just for rendering.

 

The explanation is that C4D likes fewer objects, even if they have more data in them, which is the exact opposite of how CAD programs, and my old render app Lightscape, liked files set up.

[Frosty]

I had never heard that before Ernest. However, I did notice that C4D renders faster without instances when using GI.

 

It really sounds like woodface needs to optimise his pylon and plant structures more that anything.

[Ernest Burden III]

It really sounds like woodface needs to optimise his pylon and plant structures more that anything.

 

Agreed. Can we see what they look like? Maybe some suggestions will come to mind.