Many Lights And Ram Issue

[michael76]

Hello everyone,this is my second post here. I have a ram problem when my scene has a lot of lights.I work in the lighting design field and most of my scenes are night shots.So a typical exterior of a villa may contain 30 lights or so.I use vray lights and photometric(ies) to light my scenes.In some point,when i render i get a memory failure message amd max crashes,or it doesnt render.I'm running on Win Xp 32-bit with 3GB RAM and dual core cpu 1.83.How can i solve this issue?Is dynamic memory my solution?How can i render with lots of lights without having memory failure?

I have in mind to switch on 64-bit with 8 GB RAM and a quad cpu but until then I would appreciate any suggestions..

[BrianKitts]

Is it really all the lights that's causing the problem? I would take one of your scenes that crash turn off all the lights but one and see if it crashes at render time.

 

Can you post a screenshot of your scene, or tell us more about it. How heavy is the geometry load, are you making use of proxies, and have you tried rendering to an image file?

[michael76]

When i have one light or a few i don't have a problem,but as my lights increase my viewport navigation gets slower and when i render with full lights vray crashes or sometimes max ends without warning.I use proxies but until now i havent use vray image raw file.I run nvidia gforce 8400.Maybe its a grafic card issue.If i increase ram or get a better card will I be able to render with many lights without a problem? I work all the time with night scenes so i really must find a solution to make my life easier.

I'm abroad right now,as soon as i get back I'll post a shot of my scene and the number of polygons.It isn't really a large scene so i don't think this causes the problem.I'll try though the image file and see what happens.

[Mr-JosE]

I think it might be that you're running out of memory due to the large amount of shadow maps you're creating. It might be a good idea to low the size of the shadow maps or perhaps render sets of lights in passes and combine the final result in post. You could start using proxy versions of your models but it will add to the setup time on complex scenes, and you will have to get into the discipline of updating the proxy models everytime you make a change to the original model data.