Can anyone give me a rough idea of how many imported Poser Mil figures (V3, M3) it takes to choke a Carrara render?

This is with 2GB of RAM.

I can usually go with about 3 Mil figures (complete with hair & clothes) in P6 before I start experiencing problems. Add a 4th figure to the scene -- and the ride with P6 firefly starts to get a little rough. Insert 5 figures: and forget ever getting a render out of the other end.

So I'm curious if the Carrara renderer has similar limitations -- or if Carrara can take you a step or two beyond what native Poser firefly can do.

Thanks!

Depends on how many light bulbs are in the scene? ;-) Seriously, you should be able to easily get over 5 Poser figures in a C5Pro scene, but that would depend on other complexities of you scene. If you wanted to, you could put thousands of Poser instances in a C5Pro scene with the replicators -- make your own Tiananmen square.

What kind of demand does the replicator put on memory per item replicated?
This morning I replicated a bulb light 1000 times and managed to choke Carrara... but that's obviously more than just an object replicated.

Message edited on: 01/28/2006 22:38

Hmm. I got two V3's, one EJ, one M3 one Don and two Judys in Bellas Saloon (a pretty big prop set from Poser World if I recall)in C4Pro for an animation with no probs. Been a while, but chances are I was probably using lower rez textures. I have 1.5g ram

OH I wanted to know about this too. Thanks. BTW Vue I doesn't seem to have any memory probs with lots of daz figures, but just some big texture problems although I haven't tried recently, I think it might have troulble with figures with same names with different textures, but you could always save each mil figure as a vue object then there would be no memory problems. But I'll stop here as this is the carrara forum not the vue forum. Love esther

Thanks for the responses here. This is an issue that interests me, as I've been looking for a good alternative to Poser for rendering purposes. Sure, it's possible to get some excellent renders out of P6: and new plug-in tools like GlowWorm are helping a lot -- but unfortunately, Firefly still has inherent memory limitations that are quite irritating (to say the least).

Vue is a great alternative renderer for the most part -- but Vue has its little quirks along the way. And I've found that even Vue Infinite can have problems in dealing with complicated Poser scenes. Add more than 3 or 4 mil figures to a scene, and then Vue tends to choke up, too. It certainly slows down a lot. And this is not what I am looking for at all. However: Vue has other aspects to it that still make me glad that I've got the program as an additional tool.

The replicating tool is a Carrara feature of which I was totally unaware. I can think of some great uses for such a tool. For example: Stonemason's city scenes look fantastic -- but deserted. It's as if everyone had gone away. Cities are normally crowded, busy places. Perhaps Carrara's replication function would provide a way to make crowds appear where they need to be -- and not make the city look like a ghost town.

I don't know on that Vue issue - Depending on the rest of my scene, more than 3 to 5 and my machine used to 'buy it' before I upped my memory from 1gb to 2gb. Every figure added adds a lot to the memory usage - keep your 'task manager' (Win) or 'activity monitor' (OSX) going while running Vue and watch how your memory creeps up.

That was not replicated figures though, but distinct individual fully clothed figures like in this image:
That one was a real memory problem for me back when I did it, which ended up costing me a day of rendering.

it's a very nice render! Beautiful image. Love esther

Not to hijack here, but I know going from 1GIG to 2 makes an impact here, but is it really worth it to go to 3GiG performance vs costs? I know it would depend on the scenes, but seeing if it is a significant boost for the money? I have a P4HT.

I just looked at the bench marking thread again...looks like from 2-3 isn't really helpful.Going to research.

As I understand the matter, in order to get the benefit out of RAM sizes greater than 2G, you've got to make the jump up to 64bit. A windows 32-bit box is pretty much limited to making full use of 2G. Beyond that, and it's wasted space.

Like Xenophonz said, going past 2 gig will only help if you run multiple RAM hungry applications at the same time. Although 32 bit Windows (XP, 2000) can "use" 4 gig, there is a per application limit of 2 gigs. If you tend to start big renders, and work in some other ram hungry app while waiting for the render to finish, the extra head room is great.

Yeah, ideally there is no such thing as too much ram, but I don't tend to do too many resource intensive things at once...I am too trained:)I think I would rather take anything beyond "nice to have" to a better processor fund.Honestly, a gig has been fine, but 3D takes a massive bite.I would like to find that toms hardware tests....couldn't find it. Nice to see what real world benefit is.

You know, I've never actually tried to make Carrara choke...heheh, now I'm curious. I have been able to do a render with 4 mil figures in the past without Carrara crashing so I guess that's good. I do recall once having the app crash on me once when I started a render featuring two sanctum arts armors and a mil figure, along with various assorted scenery bits. It happened right at the start of the render, and the second time around seemed to go OK (if a bit slow). As I understand it however, SA products generally tend to be very resource intensive.

To what extent does the render farm option increase C5's capacity? I have five machines networked, with at least two that can probably handle rendering. Will that effect both capacity and speed? M

Absolutly! More machines means quicker render times. There are a number of threads here about render farms and their effects on speeding up render times. (One includes a farm of multiple multi-threaded processors for something like 22 render nodes!) Do a search and see what you find. Personally I can't wait to get my new machine on line. Then I'll setup my farm with the old machine and a bunch of other new and old machines here at the office. (Just don't tell my co-workers... ok? ;) )