Most of my renders finish fast without any problem. But one figure in particular, sanctum's horde werewolf, sometimes causes memory problems because his entire body hair is full of transparency maps. Usually it will render to about 70%, then just stop. Right now, i have a ghetto technique, where i just area render the rest of the image, and it combines. But is there a way i can completely get it to render without doing that?

Here's all the necessary info.

Running tri-core 3.1 ghz, 4 gigs of ram, windows xp 32-bits. (I'm limited to 2 gigs because of the 32-bit OS, but this usually isn't a problem)

The scene had a floor prop, one werewolf figure, one human figure with SSS applied by ezskin2.

The lights included a diffuse IBL with AO and an HDR image, one infinite light with raytracing shadows on, one rim light no shadows, one fill light no shadows.

My render settings are attached.

In the general settings i have "render in a separate process" checked.

After looking around, i saw a few tricks to try out. One said to raise my minimum shading rate from .1 to .2. I tried that and it still cut off. Another person said to turn off "light emitter" on the hair. I did, and it still cuts off. Turning down raytrace bounces from 2 to 1 did let it finish, but does this make any difference? I didn't notice much change in shadow quality. What other settings can i tweak to fix this memory issue? I'm barely hitting the limit because the werewolf renders fine when hes at a farther distance, but closeups give me problems when he's combined with another figure with Ezskin 2 SSS. And it's only this figure where i've ever had a memory issue.

 

Are you rendering as a separate process?

Also decreasing the irradiance cache will save some memory

 

The only thing I could think of is lowering your max bucket size to 16, that should theroetically cut your ram usage in half when rendering. It will increase render time but hopefully the full renders will finish.

It's a really easy fix: uncheck Light Emitter for the hair in its properties panel. It'll render much faster and without hogging memory ;).

Laurie

Yeah, i'm rendering in a separate process. I did try to tick off light emitter, but that doesn't seem to work on the horde werewolf. It still runs out of memory =(

Did you load any textures with texture filtering set to none? That will cost lots of memory.

• Put all textures at quality or crisp. => U can use the free Scenefixer script for that.

MSR at 0.2 is the normal lowest setting. 0.1 is overkill and only costing memory.

Put:
RBounces at 2, is good. But you can use 1 if you have no reflections going on.
IC at 32, the default, but you can try at 0 (zero)
PSamples at 4, or even 3 => 6 is heavy overkill for a simple scene
MSR at 0.2 leave it there
Bucket size, 16 or 8 or 4 => decreasing will reduce memory load for slightly longer render time

Fastest?
RB at 1
IC at 0
PS at 3
MSR at 1
Bucket size  : play between 32, 16,8, or 4 (4 being the slowest but less memory hungry)

Optional:
Post filter size at 3 and on Type use sinc
GCorrection ON at 2.2

First check that ALL textures are at quality or crisp.

And a question?
What size is the HDR on the IBL light???? Set it at 256x256 pixels. YES, 256x256 pixels.
Too large a HDR on an IBL light is the fastest way to memory overload.. (I never use IBL or AO) => Allways IDL.

Check the displacement map value.  If it looks high, it will choke your render.  You may need to rely on bump mapping but it will affect the hair appearance on closeup.  On your render, apply a value to the min. displacement bounds (i.e., 0.1), it may not be necessary but when you hover over that setting, the help field below recommends increasing the value from zero. 

Otherwise, uncheck Use displacement maps and rerender.  This might narrow down the problem.

There is a lot of great information up there, but you have to remember that Sanctum's horde werewolf is very complex and does take a lot of ram. I ran this quick test and it took almost two gig of ram for PP2012 to run the render. I was using 3.5 gig before the render started and the render took it up to almost 5.5 gig.

according to the initial post, you are running 32 bit windows.

My tutorial Breaking the 2Gb Barrier tells you how to raise the limits to 3Gb. Might save your day. http://www.book.artbeeweb.nl/?p=110 

And do render as a separate process, but that was still the case I read.

happy rendering.

Yeah, the horde werewolf takes a lot of memory. Other people i talked to said that it's normal. In most cases, i can get 2 werewolves to render if i reduce the raytrace bounces to 1. What impact on quality does this have though from reducing the RB from 2 down to 1 for a simple scene?

And does rendering it till it stops, then area rendering the rest of it (this combines both renders into one) seem like a good solution for now?

This problem also completely disappears when using depth map shadows, but i don't really like using those anymore =P

Area rendering is a viable solution, I'm afraid, as long as piecing together doesn't wind up mismatched.  Reducing RT from 2 to 1 will not impact on your render, this is only significant with reflective surfaces.  Perhaps reducing your pixel sampling may help to complete your renders.

I guess i'll alternate between area rendering and reducing my raytrace bounces for the meantime. I'll check if lowering pixel sampling works too. I'm gonna upgrade to win 7 64-bit when i update my comp later this year anyways.