Memory management

[Devin Johnston]

I'm just starting an animation project that consists of about 12 large buildings on a very hilly site connected by roads and green spaces. Currently I have the site along with 5 of the buildings modeled and I've already got a vertices count of 2,768,142 which is using about 1.65GB of ram. This is before I've put a single tree, car, or person in the scene and none of the render nodes in my farm have more than 2GB of ram in them. You can see that I'm going to exceed my memory limits long before I finish putting all of the elements into my scene. So I'm looking for suggestions as to how I can go about doing all that I need to do in this situation and still be able to render it out at the end of the day. I plan on making proxy objects out of most everything in the scene but I fear that it won't be enough, so are there any other tricks that you Vray users have found for situations like this?

[carloscristerna]

Hey there; you should try rendering elements

 

Site

Buildings (this can be divided too)

Cars and road

Vegetation

 

Later you can put it together in afterFX or your compositing tool of choice

 

Using the Matte/Shadow material helps a lot in these situations.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Carlos Cristerna

[Devin Johnston]

That's definitely an option but I've only done limited compositing and I'm a little unsure if I can achieve the same results using this method.

[WAcky]

Mental ray can do render passes and merge them together on the fly...Does Vray really not have a function like this??

 

Even if it doesnt i would still agree that render passes would be a good option...before buying new pc's

[Devin Johnston]

I don't know if Vray can do that or not.

 

Instancing is really great, since I first posted I've tripled my vertices count and turned all of my buildings into proxy's and my memory usage is still under 1 gig so I think I might be able to get everything in.