Hello friends

Thats a question I wanted to ask for a while. There is a wonderful animation on E-on web site made by Phlippe Bouyer. And its made on a 512mb system.

I want to ask how its possible - I am using an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ with 2gb of ram and getting not enough memory messages when I tried to use more than 3 ecosystems on a still image. Thats why I never dare to try animation with an ecosystem.

Am I doing something wrong ? I am using standard page file sizes (inital:2046 max:4096)

Thanks in advance...

My experience is that the out of memory problem is not directly linked to the available RAM a system has. It is related to the used OS too i would say.

I run Infinite on an Pentium 3 even with 256 MB Ram only. And render the scenes there i have created on my main system. Never had an oom there. It is slow, yes but it works. There i use still Windows 2000 Pro and never got those errors others have on Windows XP.

"There i use still Windows 2000 Pro and never got those errors others have on Windows XP"

Thats interesting point... What if I run Infinite on XP with compatibility mode to windows 2000 ?

Could it be the video card....?

I'm on a intel 2.5ghrz, 2gig ram machine xp pro...I've been rendering images with 3 or more ecosystems.  Just stills (I'm not an animator) but they have not given me any problems.  This is a lap top too.

Also...do you have other things running when you render that might take memory away from view (ie high priority items)

Well, unfortunately i am the Mac guy here (beside a lot others of course) so i have not too much experience with Windows settings. I simply use an old Windows box because it is there.

It indeed can as well be the graphic card memory that overflows. Try to switch off OpenGL and see what happens.

Quote - Well, unfortunately i am the Mac guy here (beside a lot others of course) so i have not too much experience with Windows settings. I simply use an old Windows box because it is there.

It indeed can as well be the graphic card memory that overflows. Try to switch off OpenGL and see what happens.

You are lucky... a PowerMac G5 was my dream - but they started to use intel processors on them too :P

I am using an Asus N6600 PCI Express video card with 256mb of ram. On my scenes there are always a lot of objects imported from Cinema 4D and mixed ecosystems.

As you said its working slowly but its working. I guess I am asking for too much sometimes...

OOM errors can be the result of many things.

Number of lights and their shadow types and whether or not they're volumetric.
Number of image maps and the sizes of them. Multiple Poser figures create problems here.
Whether or not you're using GI and/or Radiosity and/or HDRI image maps.
Number of polygons not in eco-systems
Whether or not you're using native VOB files or imported 'other' file formats.

Perhaps you can check a few of these and see if they are the problem.

Try not to get imported meshes into heavy ecosystems. Eran Dinur's eco didn't have imported objects, and most of them were trees (it was Cerdo Verde, right?) that V5I heavily optimizes, so that isn't taking much RAM.
Animation, as I can tell, isn't really different than stills. You just have to be smarter and get everything static done in the first place and animate in box mode. (That's for me, working on a Athlon XP 2500+ and 768MB of RAM)

It depends on many things: what are the objects used for ecosystems? Native vue plants? Or imported objects? If the latter, do these objects have large texture maps applied to,them? generally ,big textures can cause OOM ( bear in mind that a 4096x4096 single map uses 64 megs of ram)

If imported geometry, did you resave the objects first in vob format? It would be a good idea.

Do you use shadow maps? They can be very ram hungry too, depending on their size and bias.