I am constantly receiving "memory allocation errors" when trying to render a scene. I think 40% is the furthest I have managed to get, but the rendering often stalls right at the start. I have tried tweaking the render options, but they weren't wildly ambitious to start with. According to the Windows Task Manager, memory use by Carrara goes up to about 0.9 Gb as soon as the rendering starts and stays at around the same level. There is no sign of a memory spike where the error is issued. The total memory is 2Gb, most of which is still available. It's Carrara 5, with the latest fixes on. Is there anything I can tweak, to avoid this problem, as far as anyone knows, please? As things are, it is making Carrara unusable.

Could you post a copy of the file?

I've gotten this when my scene got corrupted. You might want to try & save as & rename........

I don't think I can post a copy of the file. Unless I save with "save all externally" for the texture maps, Carrara won't let me open the file again. In fact, I get memory allocation errors on the attempted save and on the close. I suppose I just have to assume that Carrara is not up to handling this file. Many thanks for the suggestions.

Maybe start with a clean boot of puter & try again :) At least so you can get it open :) Hope you get it worked out :)

Is this an old car file you are trying to load in c5?

Are you loading the file in Carrara, then rendering? If so, try starting Carrara, go right to the render room, then render the file via the batch render option. This will use less memory -- in many cases, a lot less.

Thanks for all the ideas. It looks as though the file is never going to render, though, so I have started on a reduced version. Carrara seems to be an incredible memory hog. When I tried the batch render approach, memory use raced up to 1.4 Gb during the opening of the file and the rendering bombed out at once. The next time, I minimized the window at the start of rendering, which freed 0.6Gb and allowed the rendering to proceed - but it still ended with a memory allocation error. For the record, it is a new Carrara file, but with objects imported via Transposer.

Raher than scraping the pic....here is a suggestion that might be workable for you(sounds like your scene is massive). 1. Re-open the the scene & delete 1 item at a time(preferably starting in the front - that way easier to add in postwork). Then try & render. Repeat this till it renders fully. Make sure you do a save as before deleting so you don't have to go back & reposition. Hope that makes sense.

I am having a similar problem with a scene I am working on with 3 poser figures imported. C5 gets very very unstable the minute I load it in. I have 2GB or real RAM and a huge amount of hard disk space available for the swap file, but it still gives that darn error. I spent two weeks modeling this scene and I really don't want to have to start over, but I may have to.

That is very odd? When I render without loading the file in the Assembly Room, and simply directly render the file via batch, my memory use is always lower. Some large files that get allocation errors when rendering from Assembly (and run out of memory space) will render this way. In a few cases I have Paused, quit Carrara, then restarted rendering (to flush some memory).

A logging system like DAZ has would really help identify these issues. You can't really send these files to support so it is difficult to see what is wrong w/o a good log file for errors.Someone said the mac's have a log, but it can't be but so good at error catching or people don't know it exist. Cause I don't hear people using it.I think we should all request this because it would make eovia's and it's customers' lives easier.

You might also check on a new feature in 5.0.5 - under Preferences/Imaging, Scratch Disks; be sure texture spooling is on. This makes Carrara use disk virtual memory for large texture maps, instead of loading them into memory.