Memory and the big file

[Rhino169]

Hello all,

I am currently running rather large truespace files that are around 123mb in size.

When I am in the process of rendering them, I get the 1/4 screen rendered and then the last 3/4 ends up black.

I watch my memory usage during that time with windows task manager and see the memory top out at around 1.5gb.

I have 4gb currently maxing out my motherboard now and am using ts7.61 on windows XP. I was thinking maybe trying them on ts6.6 if that might help.

Without buying a new motherboard, what tricks can I use to free up the maximum amount of memory so truespace can get closer to the 4gb I have on my computer?

Thanks for any insight..maybe I have to turn off some other proceses on my computer? Is there a less resource intensive render setting?


Regards,
Jeff H.

[marcel]

How many polygons have this scene ?
Just to know if the problem is elsewhere. Several solutions.

[Emmanuel]

I know this problem very well.

Lightworks can't handle very heavy scenes (in megabytes), and even large scenes (in meters). If the scene is too heavy it stops rendering (the rest is black), and if the scene is too large, like a neighborhood scene superior to 500 m x 500 m, it does not even start rendering.

The trick with large scenes is to reduce the size : select all objects in scene and scale it down 10x. Therefore, a 500 m x 500 m area will become a 50 m x 50 m place.

With heavy scene, it is more problematic. You will notice that if you render at a lower resolution, tS can complete the rendering.
So a workaround is to render portions of the screen, and next to re-assemble the portions in Photoshop (or else).
Try this :
- Clic the Render_a_portion_of_the_screen icon, then move the cursor at 0,0, press Ctrl key and drag the mouse to select the top 1/3 of the screen. This will render to file the first 1/3 of your image.
- Next, do the same and drag the mouse in order to select the second 1/3 of the screen. Make sure you clic in a position that was already in the first 1/3 so the portions will overlap. Overwise you may miss some lines of your render.
- Same thing for the last 1/3.
With this trick I was able to render a >100 Mb scene in 8000 x 8000 pixels.

It is important to avoid going to such big scenes. Always try to optimize polygons, especially on objects that are far from the camera. Here you can use the LOD tool (or a tSX made for GameSpace that does the same job - but sorry I don't remember its name).

I hope this will help

[Emmanuel]

Ah, and about the memory, having a super motherboard with plenty of ram doesn't help.
I am currently running tS on an Asus P6T with an i7 (6 cores) and 8 Gb of ram + Windows XP PRo 64.
TrueSpace is a 32 app ; it will only use a maximum of 2 Gb of ram ... and lightworks will probably stop rendering if tS's own memory use exceeds 1 or 1.5 Gb.

[Rhino169]

Emmanuel,

Thanks soooo much for that simple idea.

I never really ever used the render protion of the scene option but after your description, it seems obvious!

I will give it a try.

I was going to try something similar by turning on and off layers in the model and rendering...but the shading and shadows would have been wrong between objects.

Marcel...I will get that polygon count for you also. I have most objects reduced with the polygon reduction already.

Thanks again,
Jeff H.

[Rhino169]

Update.....

I finally got ts6.6 reloaded and tried to open the giant file which was bogging down and giving me a 1/4 rendered screen in ts7.61.

It seemed to be working fine...even with me playing music and surfing the web at the same time....which I was unable to do due to resource usage.

ts6.6 renedered the entire image fine ....except.....l.

Only wierd part was that the colors I had add to the objects in ts7.61 were all gone and it only had standard gray for the entire model.

Any idea why? I was just using basic colors with the luminosity turned up in ts7.61.......with no other shaders involved.

Thanks,
Jeff

[Finis]

Just thinking and you'll probably get better answers from those with knowledge or experience with these issues.

TS 6.6 (stand alone, not TS 7.6 model side = 6.6+) likely uses much less memory than TS 7.6 since it has no workspace. It is not two programs in one. Using less memory means more for the render so the big file could render.

If the texture problem isn't a bug then maybe it is a backward compatibility problem. Maybe TS 7.6 textures/colors are slightly different than TS 6.6.
Test: save a simple scene from TS 7.6 the same way you saved the big one and see if the colors are OK in TS 6.6.
Possible Sloution: be sure to save the scene from TS 7.6 in TS 6.6 format. The save dialog box has a list.

What is the giant scene? Why is it so big?

[spacekdet]

the colors I had add to the objects in ts7.61 were all gone and it only had standard gray for the entire model.
Any idea why?

There's probably a technical explanation involving a lot of mumbo-jumbo and spaghetti, but basically it's due to their having 2 different render methods.
(real-time vs. a render engine) You have to commit to one or the other and texture accordingly.

In the mood for a little more experimentation? If your 7.61 version has Model side, turn on bridge, switch to Model, and save as *.scn format using the Model side file menu. Give it a different file name just to be safe.
This might work, it might not, the troll that lives under the bridge loves to gobble up textures.

BTW, I've done the 'area render+stitch together afterwards' trick and it works.

[Finis]

real-time vs. a render engine

Oh! I thought you were using 7.6x model side.

[spacekdet]

He may have been. I can't keep all the 7.x flavors straight.