ideas! chop 6gB mem to 2gB- mem

[Koper]

what would you do

 

 

The situation

a 3min 30sec+ animation and all incl. deadline next Friday.

 

 

Ok, I just now had the previous thread with the backburner prob. thats sorted thanx

 

so, now that i have done the first test renders I realize that it eats up 6gb mem on every 64bit comp at average 17min/frame. I need to get it down to 2gb for rendering across our server with 64bit & 32 bit compers just to render ahead of time so i can do the post work.

 

The Scene

 

4 Big appartment complexes (two detailed interiors of two of them), a big parking area in the middle, and a HUGE neighborhood next to everything just to show context. (huh)

 

 

Current scene

 

Everything Xrefed except terrain and animated objects.

 

 

Next step

 

so my next step is just to go and collapse every single object with the same material(respective to xref file).

this will only make it quicker to load when rendering.

 

Tall Order??? hehe

 

What would you do to cut down the 6gb to 2gb?

- render in passes? - green, animated objects, backgrounds?

 

would it actually render faster when rendering in passes??

 

 

 

ps.... I had this song in my head for some time now

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSGVCEOjIlQ

 

 

 

so who's gonna take a shot?

 

coool

[Matt McDonald]

When you say 17 minutes how many frames are you letting render? A natural thing that happens is to look at the estimated completion time after only a frame or two have rendered and crap your pants. Typically the frame times begin to drop.

 

Try and figure out if there is anything you could do without if you absolutely had to. I'm sure it won't look as good without cars in the parking lot but render without them and if you get done early render them as a separate pass.

 

And you've got to be able to break it up some. At least get the interiors in a separate file from the interiors. Maybe it needs three files... outside, transition, inside. but you should be able to do it.

 

You could buy render farm time. Or buy more render servers. This job sounds big enough to pay for a few.

 

Smaller bitmaps, collapsed modifier, etc.

 

Good luck!

[Koper]

yup thats the only way to go, shot-files. I have got it down to 3gb now, so it should be stable on most compers.

 

tanx

[Devin Johnston]

One of you biggest memory eaters is going to be your maps, if you want to save on memory reduce the map file sizes bit either resizing or using more compression.

[Koper]

Well, the xref way with different shot files is the best method. The memory usage is now stable. I never realy before have used xrefs but they work gr8, especially when you have 8 different shot files and need to change something that reflects throughout all of them.