I have seen posts in the past concerning being unable to import certain objects or bryce fritzing out when you tried to save. I recently upgraded from 256 sdram to 512 ddr. And I noticed I was still having the same problems concerning bryce "running out of memory". Anyway. My hd's are partitioned into several smaller drives, 180 gigs all divided up, 3d/games/movies/mp3's/operating system. The operating sys hd, consequently the C drive. is 3 gigs. Now Somehow along the way I had filled the desktop oops with 1.9 gigs of crap... This limited the Virtual Memory to a shocking low of 143 megs... Causing severe system instability. Now I never realized or thought of this since I have 120 or so gigs of freespace (but not on the OS drive) So this is a warning to everyone, Make sure you have PLENTY of virtual memory when saving/importing objects.

Yep, I give virtual memory a whole HD to itself (at least until I need the space :) ) so that it can fragment it as much as it likes and doesn't affect performance. It made for a very stable Win98Se system.

Attached Link: http://users.iafrica.com/d/da/dalen/

A few things can degrade access speed which may cause access errors. --You can point memory allocation to a particular drive. If your OS drive is a 7200rpm and the VM drive is a 5400rpm, that can cause a bottle-neck. --There are some issues with sys. mem vs Video mem. /ddr vs sdram. --The most common problem for me are TSR's, (Terminate but Stay Resident) programs. If you don't reboot or have a memory clearing program your at a disadvantage even before opening Bryce. I use a small program called TCLockEX which places a small memory usage bar in the tool tray. I tried the memory clearing programs, yet they seem to want to randomly clear right when your at a crucial point in some project. Best bet; keep an eye on the usage, save the project, and reboot. I know there are other benchmark/monitoring programs out there, maybe someone else has had good luck with another? Good luck

I Love my Windows 2000 Pro; Seems nearly invincible to TSR's. SO freaking easy to allocate your virtual memory. One suggestion, allocate a set range for your virtual memory...meaning instead of making a min/max say, 0 to 512mb, make it 512mb min. and 512mb max. This will drastically cut your fragmenting. If you can, have completely seperate hard drives. One for your operating system, and one for files. Increases loading times/performances. And, if you REALLY can...3 hard drives, one for OS, another that has Bryce installed on it, and another for your scene files, and place your swap file on a hard drive other than your OS hard drive. And, of course (if you can) have 7200rpm hard drives with biggest cache's you can get.(8mb) I've been lucky that I now have this 3 hard drive set up, with 512mb sdram and 512mb virtual memory. I never crash, I've never had any error messages, never ran out of memory. But bottom line, get as much ram as possible, allocate enough virtual memory as you can. AgentSmith

Hm, Windows says Virtual memory = 1.5 times RAM. PC Mag says something different: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,581587,00.asp More tips on handling virtual memory (all one link): http://www.pcmag.com/category_search_results/?qry=Virtual+memory&section=1488&title=Tips&d_section_id=1488&d_section_style_id=403&d_tips_category_section_style_id=409&site=PC+Magazine

I've got 50 gig of virtual memory. That should be enough. I think the swapfile usually is around 300 MB, but it can grow if I work on large images or huge scenes.

That's maximum if 50 gig. It's only used when neccesary ofcoarse.

Well, It's not really a huge problem, I was just reminding people to check it out, because my virtual memory was severely cutting my performance, I mean 148 of vmem and 512 of ddr causes problems...

Gah, apparently that wasn't the problem... I can't even load a 4 meg obj file... Wtf? Is this something wrong with bryce or my computer? I've never had this problem before. I might have a virus or something, scanning now. Has anyone else encountered this problem. I tried using 3dwin to convert the file, but even that could not load it. I tried other files that i have been able to load in the past and got the same error.

Anything installed new?

you can set your Virtual memory to whatever you like. All of the above is good advice. As a rule, Virtual Memory settings use available memory, and when that's used up, it uses the Hard Drive. If you set the setting too high, you'll notice the hard drive is almost always in motion. (the missus' PC, which I'm on, only has 64 meg, so I'm hearing the poor HD constantly). So see if you can change your Virtual memory settins, especially if you put in another 256 meg of mem.
There are particular programs (AOHells Instant Mangler, to name just one) that just grab resources all over the place. One thing I do is disable it as soon as I'm booted up (dang kids, but it's cheaper than long distance..;) You can right click and exit the programs. Helps a little. Also clearing out your offline content from the Browser, cleaning unneeded cookies, etc., helps.

I know all these, But loading a 4-5 meg obj file should be a piece of cake for a system with 512 ddr400 and 1.5 gigs of allocated vram...

I think so..I made a 40-meg model once, and brought it into Bryce, but it took about 30 seconds. (not on purpose..just subdivided a few too many..;) I dunno..looks like you have the resources, should work.

Try running it through UV Mapper. I've had obj files that wouldnt open with Bryce and just loading them in to UV Mapper and saving them(without changing anything) fixed the problem.

You're right Ornlu, it shouldn't really strain at all at doing that, I've loaded a 45mb .obp before, took a minute or two, but it did it just fine, and I only have the 512mb sdram, compared to your ddr. AS