Mental Ray out of memory? Not according to the task manager

# 1 12-08-2008 , 03:07 AM

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Mental Ray out of memory? Not according to the task manager

Hi,

looking for some help and advice.

I've been getting this message a lot recently when I try and render my scene:

mental ray: out of memory
MEM 0.5 fatal 031008: can't allocate 75547876 bytes.
MEM 0.5 fatal 031008: can't allocate 75547876 bytes.

the scene has around 360,000 faces which I don't think is excessive. It's got around 15 textures, most 1024x1024 and one the is 2046x2046. They're all targas, apart from one HDR. It's when I show the HDR and activate final gather that I get the error.

Watching maya in the task manager, it never goes above around 1.5 gigs. I've got 3 gigs installed.

I think I should have plenty of memory to manage this - has anyone else encountered this, or can make any suggestions how to fix in terms of settings etc?

Trying to get some stuff rendered out for a job application that needs posting tomorrow so any help appreciated!

cheers

gubar

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# 2 12-08-2008 , 03:55 AM

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weird... thats under 100mb its trying to allocate.

Reduce your swap file usage, if your using too much it can do weird loops and crash (i dont understand it, but its true user added image

).

Ummmm, also your bsp depth, reduce it to 15 -20 that should help alot. And the obvious things of closing any extra applications,

One thing that may help, or may not at all, is to convert your textures to Block Ordered Textures, (google it, there are some conversion scripts around), but basically a BOT holds multiple versions of the same image and maya will load in the most appropriate one depending on your render space.

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# 3 12-08-2008 , 03:57 AM

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ok, how many sticks for ram have you got, im hoping 4, if youv got 2 sticks of ram then that means that one of them is proberly 1gb and the other 512mb and ram does not work well together if they are odd peices and not equal.

other then that check how much your operating system has designated itself to your ram and see if lowing that helps the render.

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# 4 12-08-2008 , 04:52 AM

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Thank for the responses.

Laurie priest, I tried altering the BSP but no luck (though I only tried the Large preset I have to admit). I haven't heard of the other suggestions you mentioned though will look into them for future reference - in the meantime though, I've managed to get renders by assigning MR subdivision approximation nodes to my objects rather than maya smooth nodes. I thought that would in fact be more memory intensive, but it works so I'm happy (any differences the alternate method makes to the object's is negligible).

Curtis - I've got 4 sticks of one gig (I did say I had 3 gigs, so couldn't have had 1g + 512mb) each. XP 32 bit only recognises 3 gigs without changing the boot.ini file, which I don't want to do. 3 gigs has always been plenty for anything I need anyway, will suffice until I upgrade to 64.

cheers folks

gubar

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# 5 12-08-2008 , 05:27 AM

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Originally posted by curtis08
ok, how many sticks for ram have you got, im hoping 4, if youv got 2 sticks of ram then that means that one of them is proberly 1gb and the other 512mb and ram does not work well together if they are odd peices and not equal.

other then that check how much your operating system has designated itself to your ram and see if lowing that helps the render.

Originally Posted by

My understanding of memory is that such a scenario makes no difference in most systems, so I wouldn't worry about it.

C. P. U. Its not a big processor... Its a series of pipes!

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# 6 14-08-2008 , 01:27 PM

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Cheers architect, Ive just been using the approximation editor and it seems ok.

What I've noticed is that maya won't use more than a gig. If it peaks over that then mental ray will crash. Anyone know why?

cheers

gubar

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# 7 14-08-2008 , 08:26 PM

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That is a bit mysterious... I'm afraid I don't have an answer or a clue as to why, but could you post a screenshot of the task manager while running Maya, when it has used nearly a 1 GB of memory? It might help if we can all see the swap usage and other details.

C. P. U. Its not a big processor... Its a series of pipes!

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# 8 15-08-2008 , 02:26 AM

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Originally posted by gubar
Cheers architect, Ive just been using the approximation editor and it seems ok.

What I've noticed is that maya won't use more than a gig. If it peaks over that then mental ray will crash. Anyone know why?

cheers

gubar

Originally Posted by

Thatrs strange, whilst rendering on any of my PC's it used all the RAM