This is probably old hat for some folks here, but I discovered something interesting. This is likely to be more important to folks with older hardware (like myself), since it most likely affects them.

I found when trying to render something with fancy settings all the way through, after my memory usage gets too high (and it starts hitting the HDD and going into virtual-mem) I start having instability and things get really sluggish if not freezing completely. One clue of this seems to be that the CPU usage goes from a near constant %100 to thrashing all over the place. (If you monitor process activity, you'll also see Carrara being juggled with System Idle or System processes.) Apparently Carrara doesn't properly clear memory used after finishing tiles in a continuous render. (Dunno about v.7+, but this seems to be true with older versions.)

So the fix is to use batch mode rendering. Once you get everything setup to render the normal way, save the file and then load it into the batch renderer. And then render it as a batch item. The thing that is important, is that you watch the task manager to see when memory usage starts getting high. (PF memory use starts approaching installed memory amount.) Then you go to the renderer and pause it. Then let CPU and memory settle down. Then resume the render. Interestingly enough, it starts out again with a lower memory use before creeping up again. It may be a form of "babysitting" a render in order to manage memory use, but it keeps the program from freezing completely so a render can actually be saved out of Carrara.

Anyone else do this?

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Barbequed Pixels?

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