Hi,

just discovered some "strange" behaviour during a rendering:

OS: Vista 32 home premium 4GB RAM

Vue7 Infinite 7.1 Beta-Build 377660

Scene setup:

To have an overlook about the resources Vue uses, I have changed the Poly Count to "Free resources" at the bottom right of Vue's workspace window.

Loaded an empty scene and applied the "Soft Dunes" material from the Landscape collection to the ground plane:

Added an ininite water plane and replaced the default material with the "Darker Water" material from the Liquid collection.

In the new "Ater surface editor" I have checked "Displaced Water surface" but I did not enter the function editor.

Checked the "Use global wave control" and set the slider to 79%, wind direction is set to 122.

Loaded the "Coming Storm" atmosphere from the Physical collection, which is a GR atmosphere.

Loaded the "Patrol boat" object form the vehicles/aquatic collection as a "background" object.

Nothing unusual with the scene so far, File size (compressed with textures) is 21MB on the hard disc.

Now I want to render the scene to disk in 3200x2400 pixel. This time the "Re-use indirect lightning" is not checked. The rendering goes with the internal renderer. 

The first minutes rendering runs as usual, but when the renderer reaches the water plane, I will see "building procedural terrain" in the status bar and the free resources drop down . It looks like each minute the free resources drop down by 1%. I have continued the  rendering and after ~ 90minutes I have got Vue's out of memory error.

It looks like a "memory countdown"

Curious: Vue never uses more than 1GB of memory (Windows Task Manager). No other apps are open during the rendering process. And Windows Task Manager reports a lot of free resources.

So why Vue does not use the available system memory here, when it could take 2GB ?

Kind of frustrating that Vue let you start a render without a memory warning before :...

the next try was rendering the scene with the external renderer:

No problem until it reaches ~ 25% - this might be the point the renderer reaches the water plane. It stays for 30minutes at 25% and then the external renderer restarts.

Again it renderes until it reaches 25%. Nothing happens for 30minutes. After that, the renderer stops and I got a "failed" in Vue's Batch render window.

Back home  from work, I have started a new render of the scene. External render, but this time with "Re-Use of indirect lightning" checked.

Rendering is at 60% now, memory usage of the external renderer is 500MB.

Anyone else have noticed a memory drop when the "Re-use indirect lightning" is unchecked ?

Cheers

Ralf

Re use indirect lighting is only useful when you have already rendered the scene once, and wish to reuse the indirect lighting solution. It won't work if you changed your lighting conditions or if you render at a higher resolution. What happens when this is checked, is that the radiosity calculations and prepass are not computed. It goes straight to rendering the scene, using  what(s stored in memory. Maybe radiosity and infinite procedural terrains (displaced water) are hard to compute together? Will try something like this on my lkaptop, which has about the same specs as your machine.

Unfortunall checking the "re-Use" checkbox does not solve the problem. Tis one the rendering goes to about 70% - at this time the "external renderer process" as a memory usage of 1,6 gb.

cpu usage drops down from 100% to 25% but the memory usage of the render process is counting upwards until it reaches 1.95GB and that's it: Render failed.

Ralf

During this process, I found that the water doesn't look very realistic on close-ups... I can't put the entire image here, it's too big, but zoom in on this part I attached. Weird.

What do you find weird? For my part, it's the lines i find somewhat distracting.

Yes, those very sharp lines are not realistic at all.

How disappointing... without zooming in the top part of the image looks reasonable, but the front part, even at this magnification isnt at all convincing. Are there no parameters to play around with that control the 'smoothness'? If it was a terrain I would say it needs an erosion. This is one of the the main features they claim to have improved, so I hope it isnt  the final word. (I dont have V7 yet).

I had never zoomed so close to an open ocean terrain. Looks way too sharp indeed. maybe less "chopiness"?

You can get Windows Vista 64 Home premium OEM for around
$100.00 at www.newegg.com most of the time and Load Vue as 64bit App.

It really seems to be a memory issue. Rendering the scene at 1600x1200 runs without problems.

another possibility are the renderings settings: Rendering 3200x2400 with the preview setting does not make problems.

@Rutra: what rendering settings did you use ? I am wondering, that your memory usage is at 1.35 Gb and mine is ~ 2GB.

Thanks

Ralf

I

Currently the render is running "as an administrator" and the 3GB switch added to Vista.Plus Vue has been made "large adress aware" with the LaaTiDo application. Memory usage is constant at 500MB - and it's at 67% now