iToo ForestPro problems

[SgWRX]

anyone else having issues with memory and ForestPro?

 

pretty much whatever i create with it, each render shows that it's eating up more memory whether the render is manually hitting the render button or an animation sequence via my main computer or via network rendering with another machine and backburner.

 

example:

1st render: 4300mb

2nd render: 4500mb

3rd render: 4600mb etc... up to 11th render 6600mb

 

tried a few of the memory clearing maxscripts and that doesn't help. just have to close max down (or end-task in the case of an animation) and restart.

 

iToo says it's related to mentalray not releasing memory in some way. they also said it's got something to do with a feature they have called limit to visibility, but i've found that it doesn't matter if using camera clipping or not.

 

thanks,

Edited April 30, 2015 by SgWRX

[Corey Beaulieu]

I don't know mental ray well, but I know FPP. Camera Clipping will help a lot, but the big scenes are tough. Are you using Back Burner or Deadline or what?

 

In Deadline there is a setting to restart machines after a render is complete which can help with the memory issue, but my guess would be that you are just making FPP work too hard.

 

For grass you want to create a larger piece to be copied/scattered around. The individual blades require too much of the processing. For other object, say trees, you may want to consider breaking them up into smaller chunks. Create several areas and several FPP nodes.

 

FPP is an awesome tool, but it always creates issues. I try to avoid it as much as possible which is tough because it does a great job at randomizing vegetation.

 

If it's a small amount of objects and still capping your memory, you can always use it for the randomizing power and then collapse it to static geometry once set. There is a Tool for Forest Pack in the Max Tool Panel to assist you with this.

[SgWRX]

corey, thank you. i did not know about the FPP tool! in fact, late after my post, i thought gee, just how many objects am i scattering? i found that in another scene i had 2.1M objects scattered (what a great feature for them to include)! so i did what you mentioned and made 1 small clump of grass into 1 larger clump covering more area. i got my objects scattered down to 879k and did all sorts of rendering, the initial memory of the render was about 3gb compared to 5gb and i rendered 11 successive times manually and did a quick 40 frame animation and had no problems at all. even with the camera view distance on and other things used like falloff and scale by distance.

 

as with a lot of other things, i think it comes down to wise usage fortunately it still is a big time saver for most of the scenes i encounter. this last scene amounted to a building on a plane covered with grass since we don't have any site-work done yet, just wanted to show the building design at this phase.

 

thanks,