free memory problem when rendering
 

I just upgraded my system to a dual processor board with 2 Gb of RAM, a 250 GB hard disk, and an nVidia Quadro4 graphics card.

The system i was using before had 512 Mb RAM, a single processor board with a basic graphics card.

On the old system I had a scene with a high res texture (180 by 180 cm at 72 dpi) and, albeit it had a hard time rendering this scene, it would render eventually. Now with the new system, i open the exact same file, and get a "Free Memory exception" when I try to render! Whatever I try, I cannot get this scene to render even at a low res, low quality.

Does anyone have an idea what it could be? A setting with the graphics card, a Maya setting?

Their is a free fprogram call freeRAM, could give you insights as to what going on with your ram and emtying ram.

being as it has to be 2000, NT or XP you should also be able to hit the Ctrl,Alt, Delete and get the skinny on what’s going on with your ram also.

Your graphics card shouldn't have anything to do with a strait software render. I would check your flags, settings. And consult with the help files.

used ctrl-alt-del and the task manager shows that i have more than 300 mb ram free when i try to render the scene! And I still get the same error!

A bit at a loss here. Could it have to do anything with hyperthreading?

300mb ram on a 2GB system? That's odd... can you post your mb file and I'll try rendering it on mine... (also 2GB)

Thank you Rich,

I will post it as soon as I am better - been sick for a few days now and haven't been to the office...

300MB RAM? What post did you read that from? There's not even a number like that in this whole thread! :p

First thing I would check is your texture file.

1. 180cm X 180cm... How big is that in pixels? Since I use the U.S. standard of measurement, I'm not familiar with metrics. A texture file normally shouldn't exceed 1024 x 1024, depending on its usage.

2. 72 dpi... Increase that to 300. 72 ppi is webpage graphics resolution. Your texture will look like crap close up at 72. (and 72 ppi is definitely not high res) :D

When you're dealing with resolution, you need to be concerned with the pixel ratio rather than the size of the entire image. A 512x512 pixel image at 300 ppi will have much more detal than one at 72ppi.

I'm thinking that the size of your texture is just way bigger than what Maya can handle, even with the 2GB of RAM.

Dave, Hanuman said that about the 300mb of ram in his second post in this thread.

A texture file should sute the situation. Its all based on what your final rendering res will be. But the max res maya can handle with out starting to generait a lot of errors is 8192x8192.

There are 2.54 cm in one inch. so 180cm at 72dpi is 5098 pixels wide. Well with in maya's limets.

That 300mb was the amount of free memory while Maya was trying to render the scene - should have been a bit more specific then. I checked the pixels and yes, it was within the 5000 range. I have managed to render the scene in the meantime by running optimizeRender - and also realized that I did not need such a large texture in the end...

What still boggles me is how I could render the scene with a computer that was not even half of the current configuration that i now have.

By the way, Rich, I checked the size of the scene and it is about 10 Mb, which is more than my 52k dial-up modem can handle - i'd be sitting here all night uploading it. Thanks for the offer, though.

Well, I'm glad you found your way to a solution! :)

Pony: DOH! I didn't even see that and I read the post twice! (dont I feel sheepish now) :D

As for the texture size. My point on that was, why would you even need a texture that size when you could achieve the same effect at 1024x1024. Unless he's doing some really hig-res, detailed textures, it's just a waste of resources to try and render a texture file that big. I've had students importing texture files they created, not realizing they didn't resise them first, trying to open a 2GB file in Maya. CRASH! Not only did it kill Maya, but bogged the system down as well. After a resize to 1024x1023, it imported them easy.

Maya is funny like that. It may be capable of handling a 8192x8192 image, but it may not like it. :D

Thank you for the input everybody!

Dave: Mine was a bit the overkill syndrome. My texture is now 1024x1024. Lot of things to learn in Maya, and some the hard way, apparently.

Dave, yeah most times is over kill.

Well... this is just me but 1k x 1k maps can be too small if you need tight closeups in a say TV resolution render...

Anyway, a good way to render scenes with large textures is to use the command line renderer. Not only you have more system resources available but you can do other tricks too. For example you can force the width and height of the rendering tiles (or buckets) to lower than the deault which will result to lower peak memory consumtion...

Do a search on "Batch rendering from the command line" in the docs and you'll find all the details...