Hi there,

I'm totally pooped with this problem and hope that someone here can help me, please.

That's the situation:
A scene with 23 objects (V3 & D3 amongst other things), realistic sky, sea-prop and replicator. Two lights (distand and sun) with soft shadows. Now when I start to render with nigh maximum quality (no DoF) it takes about 8 Minutes until the light calculates and when the first or second patch is rendered, the application simply closes down! No error-message or something like that.
I've reduced the texture spooling to 10 MB and even tried batch-rendering, as I've read somewhere that it should use less memory.
My system is an AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 2 GB RAM, GeForce 8800 GT, Win XP SP2. And I've installed the latest patch for C6Pro, so now it's 6.2.
Someone over at Daz wrote that carrara will crash if the size is over 1,6 GB. Unfortunately he didn't specify if this means the size of the car-file or perhaps the textures (in my render-statistics the textures have a size of 2,88 GB, but I've been able to render scenes with nigh the same size)
What can I do to solve this problem or better - what am I doing wrong?
Your help is very much appreciated!!!!!!!!!! I think I'll go crazy very soon with this issue..... :cursing:

Thanks a lot and take care,

~Sassy~

Have you cleaned the unused object and shaders? Try the new update 6.2 to see with its work. Sometimes Carrara crash and its very hard to know what is the problem.

Thank you GKDantas!
Yes, I've installed the new update before and cleaned the unused objects and shaders very often, but to no avail.
With my last scene in Carrara I had the same problem when using DoF, but this tim I used no DOF.

Jedi Padawan,

 I think you just have to start deleting things from the scene and try to render again, see if it works etc.. So, you just have to try and isolate what the problem is. Is there a specific spot on the render where it crashes?  If so what is going on in that area may give you an idea as to the problem.

So I would render the scene as quickly as possible(low settings) and try and find the culprit by deleting things. Hope it goes well for you.

Mike

I had this happen the other day when I went for medium resolution AND a high-value procedural bump map. The scene was fine when rendered with a lower bump setting and/or no skylight and/or low resolution.
I guess the answer is that you may be at your machine's limit.
I did a work around by  using a working version of the scene to delete everything not in the actual shot. Even better was reducing the bump.
Oh, not to forget: When a crash like this happens, Carrara has left behind somewhere a temp file that may contain GB of useless data.  It doesn't interfere with the program but uses up disc space.

Alright, seems really as if I'm at the limits of my PC. Perhaps some moer RAM would improve the things? Though this has to wait until next month....
I'll start deleting things, though there is not much to delete which isn't in the camera view. Or could a new installation of Carrara help? I just don't want to give up this scene, that's my problem.Perhaps I'll reinstall Win XP too, it's over a year ago .....
Now I'm off drinking a beer, I'm far too upset about this whole issue.......

Thanks for your help!!!

Take care,

~Sassy~

You could also try rendering in layers  or group foreground, middleground and background objects in separate groups and then render a group at a time and then composite them together in your 2d application.

Hi jedi padawan,

Carrara will out of memory error, once it reaches about 1.7 mb, of  your physical system Ram.

Have you tried monitoring ram usage via task manager to see how much ram Carrara is trying to use for this scene.??. I would be curious to know just how much it is trying to use.

If its not using the full 1.7mb that would indicate that theres maybe a prop in your scene that Carrara doesn't like and then exits.

I must admit I have created scenes FAR larger than the one you outlined, with top quality settings/GI enabled, with no problems regards memory usage.

Cheers,

SK

 swordman10:

I hope you mean 1.7 Gb, because 1.7MB is extremely little, even for a circa 386 computer. :)

Hey SK,
thanks a lot for you imput! When I'm back home from work, I'll check and post the information here.
Actually, I have completely reinstalled my computer in the last two days and tried rendering the scene again, but it crashed again. Now I tried to completely re-create the scene but I'm not finished yet.
But anyway, I'll check in a few hours and come back here.

Thanks a lot and take care,

~Sassy~

Good morning,

I'm back home and tried to render again. Well, the results were the following according to the task-manager:
CPU efficiency 100%
swapfile 0,99 - 1GB

Have I checked the right facts? 
Actually, right before the application shuts down, the kernel-times increased up to 50% of the CPU efficiency.
Perhaps I should stop importing several car. files with models I've completed before and instead load them as objects from the browser. Well, I'm already recreating the whole scene and hopefully it ends up well when rendering.

~Sassy~

Welcome to my world.. :) 

Seriously, I used to have this issue all the time if I wasn't careful about objects I imported or created.  Poser models can cause huge headaches if your system is not maxed out on RAM.

I have a home built AMD Phenom 9600 Quad Core system, using an MSI K9A2 Platinum MB.  4GB of RAM (only 3.5 are usable thanks to 32bitarchiutecture), ATI Radeon 3650 512MB PCIE Video card. Windows Vista Ultimate 32Bit, and Carrara 6.2 Pro.

I have noticed that the main problem seems to occure when I am using more than 1 poser figure.  I think C6 doesn't like something about their geometry or something.  Also remember that it uses RAM when you have very large High Resolution texture map images.  I usually render at 1680x1050 for my widescreen monitor at 100DPI.  I go up to 300DPI if it is something I plan on printing large scale.  I usually use mid range settings for the indirect lighting, Quality Good at 2pixels, and for image anti aliasing I use best and 1pixel.  I use .jpg files as opposed to BMP files for my texture maps.  This saves a lot of system memory.

Try taking out one of the poser characters and see if that helps.  I used to get these errors a lot more often on my old system which was a AMD64x2 system with 2GB of RAM.  But I don't get them nearly enough as much on the new system unless I go completely insane and try using like 3-4 poser figures.

Quote - Hi there,

I'm totally pooped with this problem and hope that someone here can help me, please.

That's the situation:
A scene with 23 objects (V3 & D3 amongst other things), realistic sky, sea-prop and replicator. Two lights (distand and sun) with soft shadows. Now when I start to render with nigh maximum quality (no DoF) it takes about 8 Minutes until the light calculates and when the first or second patch is rendered, the application simply closes down! No error-message or something like that.
I've reduced the texture spooling to 10 MB and even tried batch-rendering, as I've read somewhere that it should use less memory.
My system is an AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 2 GB RAM, GeForce 8800 GT, Win XP SP2. And I've installed the latest patch for C6Pro, so now it's 6.2.
Someone over at Daz wrote that carrara will crash if the size is over 1,6 GB. Unfortunately he didn't specify if this means the size of the car-file or perhaps the textures (in my render-statistics the textures have a size of 2,88 GB, but I've been able to render scenes with nigh the same size)
What can I do to solve this problem or better - what am I doing wrong?
Your help is very much appreciated!!!!!!!!!! I think I'll go crazy very soon with this issue..... :cursing:

Thanks a lot and take care,

~Sassy~

That CPU percentage is not efficiency, it is utilization.  At 100% it means your systems processor is using all of its capability to perform whatever tasks it has to handle.  Are you letting the system handle the swap file or are you setting it manually?  You really want that CPU usabe to be as low as possible before you start up carrara.  Turn off all non essential programs and see if that lowers the percentage so that when you start Carrara, it has more availlable capacity for it.

Quote - Good morning,

I'm back home and tried to render again. Well, the results were the following according to the task-manager:
CPU efficiency 100%
swapfile 0,99 - 1GB

Have I checked the right facts? 
Actually, right before the application shuts down, the kernel-times increased up to 50% of the CPU efficiency.
Perhaps I should stop importing several car. files with models I've completed before and instead load them as objects from the browser. Well, I'm already recreating the whole scene and hopefully it ends up well when rendering.

~Sassy~

Hey Sparrownightmare :o)

Thanks so much for your detailed reply!
At this moment, I finally finished the scene I was working on and it rendered! What seemed to cause the problem was the replicator with the ocean, and the ocean had too high settings (1024 x 1024). Since I lowered the ocean quality to 512 x 512, reduced the number of objects to 10 and 15 (before I had 30 and 35 objects) and simply stretched the replicator on x and y axis it worked.
And you're definitely right with the poser-figures. So I started to create my poser-figures in a separate scene, saved them as new objects in Carrara and then imported them iso importing several car-files with my necessary poser-figures (whihch seemed to cause trouble, too).

Regarding my PC-components, I hope working will speed up when I upgade in a few days to 4 GB of RAM iso the 2GB that I have right now.
Oh and do you really mean that it's better if the system handles the swap-file? Cause at the moment I set it to a range from min. 2046 MB to max. 4092MB (and a separate HDD for the swap-file of 8 GB).

Again, thanks a lot for all your help!!!!

~Sassy~

Glad I could help.  Having the swap file set too high can actually cause some adverse effects like slowing the system down.  XP and Vista normally do a very good job of handling the swap file.

Also keep in mind that with any 32bit operating system, the maximum amount of memory that can be addressed is 4MB..  That includes video RAM and anything else that acts as memory.  I have a 512MB video card so my machine actually can only see about 3.5GB of the system RAM I have installed.  So don't be surprised if Windows doesn't show the full amount.

Quote - Hey Sparrownightmare :o)

Thanks so much for your detailed reply!
At this moment, I finally finished the scene I was working on and it rendered! What seemed to cause the problem was the replicator with the ocean, and the ocean had too high settings (1024 x 1024). Since I lowered the ocean quality to 512 x 512, reduced the number of objects to 10 and 15 (before I had 30 and 35 objects) and simply stretched the replicator on x and y axis it worked.
And you're definitely right with the poser-figures. So I started to create my poser-figures in a separate scene, saved them as new objects in Carrara and then imported them iso importing several car-files with my necessary poser-figures (whihch seemed to cause trouble, too).

Regarding my PC-components, I hope working will speed up when I upgade in a few days to 4 GB of RAM iso the 2GB that I have right now.
Oh and do you really mean that it's better if the system handles the swap-file? Cause at the moment I set it to a range from min. 2046 MB to max. 4092MB (and a separate HDD for the swap-file of 8 GB).

Again, thanks a lot for all your help!!!!

~Sassy~

Eegads, I just spotted a major type.  The Max amount of RAM a 32Bit OS can address is 4GB not 4MB..  Oops..

Quote - Glad I could help.  Having the swap file set too high can actually cause some adverse effects like slowing the system down.  XP and Vista normally do a very good job of handling the swap file.

Also keep in mind that with any 32bit operating system, the maximum amount of memory that can be addressed is 4MB..  That includes video RAM and anything else that acts as memory.  I have a 512MB video card so my machine actually can only see about 3.5GB of the system RAM I have installed.  So don't be surprised if Windows doesn't show the full amount.

Quote - Hey Sparrownightmare :o)

Thanks so much for your detailed reply!
At this moment, I finally finished the scene I was working on and it rendered! What seemed to cause the problem was the replicator with the ocean, and the ocean had too high settings (1024 x 1024). Since I lowered the ocean quality to 512 x 512, reduced the number of objects to 10 and 15 (before I had 30 and 35 objects) and simply stretched the replicator on x and y axis it worked.
And you're definitely right with the poser-figures. So I started to create my poser-figures in a separate scene, saved them as new objects in Carrara and then imported them iso importing several car-files with my necessary poser-figures (whihch seemed to cause trouble, too).

Regarding my PC-components, I hope working will speed up when I upgade in a few days to 4 GB of RAM iso the 2GB that I have right now.
Oh and do you really mean that it's better if the system handles the swap-file? Cause at the moment I set it to a range from min. 2046 MB to max. 4092MB (and a separate HDD for the swap-file of 8 GB).

Again, thanks a lot for all your help!!!!

~Sassy~