Topic awaiting preservation: Chains

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Can you tell me which software did you used please ?

Ultimately all things are known because you want to believe you know. -Zensunni koan

[This message has been edited by Moon Shadow (edited 02-10-2003).]

Very nice =)

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

nice! I guess the ol' clone tool in LW would do a good job of that eh?

neat render

did you have any problems with memory? Because I tried a similar render with chains, and didn't manage to render a 800x600 image with 2 reflections, because there was no memory left.
My PC stats are:
1024 MB RAM
2.4 GHZ
WinXP
Maya 4.5

I tried to increase the virtual memory, but it didn't help at all. Does anybody know how I could do this? Maybe making the render patches smaller could help? I don't know... All I did manage to do was a 320x270 image with 2 reflections. Everything beyond that used too much memory.

Here's my result I came up with at the end:

Are you using ray-traced reflections? They're slower, but rarely cause memory issues with recursive reflections.

edit - Ah, just noticed you said Maya, not Max. Still, ray-traced reflections rarely eat up much memory. A POV-ray image of hundreds of mirrored balls can render on on old pentium with 16MB of RAM, if you're really really patient.



[This message has been edited by Das (edited 02-14-2003).]

The exact error in maya is the following: "Free memory is low. Memory exception thrown"
In the Task Manager the memory usage started at about 500 mb and after 20 minutes of rendering it was at 1 gb. Can't the memory be "flushed"? I mean, the part in my image was rendered, so why can't the rest just be rendered afterwards?

The only thing I found on the internet about this error is this: http://help.thecentre.centennialcollege.ca/manuals/maya/RenderingUtilities/Render4.html

But somehow the -tw / -th flags didn't work in the render proc.

Try setting reflectivity to 0 and seeing how the memory behaves. If it only uses up all the memory when the links are reflective, you'll be sure that the problem is with reflections. Always good to be sure what's causing a problem before trying to fix it. It might be another issue with the scene.

If it is the reflections that are causing the problem, make sure that raytracing is set to 'on', set reflections to 1, and watch the memory during the render. Then set it to 2 and see if it uses up the memory faster.

Every raytracer I've used doesn't use significant memory during a raytrace. It traces the ray (or rays, if supersampling) for one pixel, then releases the memory, then does the next pixel. There's no need to keep a lot of data in memory for the raytrace operation. Heck, shadow maps often use more memory than the raytrace engine.

thanks for your tips. I'll try that.

I tested that a little bit.

no antialiasing; reflection=2; shadows=1;
result -> about 3/4 of the screen were rendered, then memory went out

no reflections; antialiasing on; shadows=2;
result -> rendered pretty fast, so I can't say fore sure, that it was the reflecitons using the memory. It went up, but it rendered so quickly, it only got up to 400 mb, what is pretty normal for a render though.

Sounds like it's definitely the raytracer blowing up. I don't use Maya, so I can't offer any specific solutions, sorry.

Really strange; I wouldn't have thought raytraced reflections could suck up that much memory.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

Hey Ini,

I've been out of the Asylum loop for sveral weeks... Big 3DStudio Job ($$$) so I want to thank you for the link to me and also to say WOW!!! Nice rendering. I did not know you got a new machine... Its great to do work without the computer crashing.