I have been trying to complete a render for about a week now and it will get about 3/4 of the way through the render and then quit with an error message about a memory allocation error.  The scene is not terribly complex and it is using settings and shaders I have used in the past.  I tried a variety of things, tweaking the render setting slightly, changing the size of the render blocks, etc., but nothing is working.

Any suggestions?  I am using C7.2 Pro.

Hi Gavotte,

That error means you run out of RAM during the render. This can be handled by modifying some of the lighting, anti aliasing or other settings. 

Can you please list the output size and list or show some screen grabs of your render settings? I can give you better direction then. 

Mark

Ahhhh, the goold old days.  I remember that error, and still very occaisonally encounter it.  It means you are out of RAM and the render could not continue.  A few things to try.

Change the render settings, especially the indirect lighting settings.  Don't try to mak them all out adjust them for a reasonable quality output.   Make sure you aren't using too large bitmaps for your textures.  Huge texture map images suck a ton of memory when rendering.  Look to make sure you don't have any very complex objects interposing at any point.  The system will use a huge amount of RAM if it needs to compute the composed geometry AND light interaction AND texture(s) for that sort of joining. 

Without actually being anle to look at the file and the settings myself, that's about the best I can come up with generally.  I hope it helps.

Rich

Wasn't there something about reducing the size of the cache used or something that  you had to do as well?

Thank you all for your suggestions.  My machine has 16G of memory so I was real surprised at the suggestion that I am running out of memory.  The system monitor is indicating that there is still a lot of unused memory available.  However, after reading some of the comments, I realize I am using high resolultion texture maps in my terrain shaders (about 1M each) and the render settings are cranked up (see file).  I will try dialing down some of the render settings to see if that works.  If I turn GI totally off, it works OK, but does not provide the lighting I am looking for.

If you further suggestions, please let me know.

Is this an animated render or just a still image.  If it's a still image select "One for all frames" under the irradiance map.  And if you don't need it, turn off skylight.  That's for outdoor scenes mostly.  Your indirect lighting settings themselves aren't all that cranked.  I almost always use the Improved edges and light through transparency settings.  I don't think I have yet to run into a situation that I needed to use Shadow Compatability mode for.  I usually don't use depth of field either.  I only have 8GB and I run all of the other settings at max.  I commonly use large texture maps.  But I very rarely hit this error now.  I do use C 8 Pro though, and it is a lot more stable.

Do you have a 64-bit system or 32?  64-bit will let you use a lot more of that RAM than 32-bit will.

Hi Gavotte, 

Thanks for posting your settings. 

1. Uncheck Full Ray Tracing because it is eliminating the memory gains made by GI interpolation. 

2. Unless you have overlapping transparency, set the Ray Tracing to 4. 

3. Turn Lighting Quality back to Good instead of Excellent. 

3D rendering is always a game of give-and-take. For a magazine article I was writing, I interviewed one of the lead animators on Monsters vs. Aliens from Dreamworks. He said that they'd love to use GI on everything but that there simply isn't enough time or computer horsepower to do it that way. So, they build lighting rigs to simulate GI instead. 

It's all smoke and mirrors. 

Does the image spool affect things anylonger?  You used to have to make it smaller (which was always odd to me.) 

With that particular error, is it a software or is it possible a hardware memory issue?

I changed all the 2 pixal settings to 4 pixals and dialed down the lighting quality to "good" and fired it off again.  It is 4 AM in the morning here and the render is still going.  It appears to be farther along than before.  If this does not finish, I will try implementing the latest suggestions.

I do have a black band showing up across the render.  I think it is coming from the realistic sky. This is very annoying.

I am running C7P on Windows7-64.  The memory monitor is indicating that I am only using about 7G of memory, leaving about 9G free.  I ran memory checks on the memory when  installed the last set of memory but I have not checked it again recently.  I will try running it again after the render completes to make sure it is not a hardware issue.

Thanks for all the help.  I will post it when compete.

It did not work.  This time, no error message at all.  C7 simply locked up and does not respond to anything.  My only option is to kill it.

I will try one more time with the suggestions provided above and then...

Ok, this will take a little trouble shooting. 

Can you post one of the sucessful renders that has GI turned off? That will throw a lot of clues out for reveiw. 

Mark

Gavotte, Is this similar to some of the outdoor scenes we've been talking about? If so, I am going to assume you have some other problem than memory (it doesnt seem to add up). In all the years I've been using C, I've never run out of memory given what I think you're working with. Are you using any plugins for the textures?

Here is an image that is about 2/3's complete, with the error I am getting.  The error normally occurs at about this same spot, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.  The remainder of the image is simply more of the same.  I also provided a top view (see next post) that shows each object in the assembly room.  It really is a very simple scene, 4 fairly simple terrains, 3 distant lights set to about 35 - 40%, and a camera.  The very far terrain is just out of view to the left.

As for the plugins, no.  The shaders are 2 terrain shaders, for the far terrains I have turned the bump way down.  Both use 2 texture maps with a simple noise mixer.  Nothing else.  This is why I am so surprised it not working.

Here is the view from the assembly room.  Again there is one more terrain just out of view to the left.

I have two possible suggestions. 1.). You can delete the front parts and render the scene piece at a time substituting your backgrounds in as you go. 2.). Maybe maybe maybe your camera is somehow slicing through a piece of the terrain. This can happen sometimes without knowing it.

I found a way to get rid of the black band across the image by raising everything (lights, camers, terrains, etc.) by 10,000 ft.  It worked in the no GI render.

As for the GI render, I adjusted the camera relative position slightly as Kix suhggested and increased the size of the bunp resolution in the terrain shader.  It is rendering now with these new settings.  Maybe this will work??

This is interesting that you got it work by raising everything 10000 ft. Are you using one of the sky presets with the ground plane? Can you email this file to me (you know my personal address). I want to play around with this in c8. -S

I want to thank everyone for their help and suggestions.  It is working now.  I made a few more adjustments and also adjusted the camera position as Kix suggested and it suddenly started working. 

I have been tweaking it some more and will do a final render tonight before posting it.  Maybe we can start a new discussion on when to call a project done? 

Thanks again for all your help!