I'm creating an image that involves a large patch of grass. This eats up a
bit of my RAM, but the image will parse and start rendering just fine.
Unfortunately fter about 8 hours into the render it quits with a memory
error "unable to allocate.."

This is the second image I've had the problem on. Both high resolution with
HDR environments and radiosity. I'm starting to think that it's the
additional samples of radiosity during the rendering that's causing the
memory overload.

I've restarted the rendering with always resample set to off and hope this
will fix it but won't know for about 8 hours if it did.

Any ideas?

Phil Brewer

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how many light sources do you use ?


news:web.449be0e863afbb2d8af060f60@news.povray.org...
> I'm creating an image that involves a large patch of grass. This eats up a
> bit of my RAM, but the image will parse and start rendering just fine.
> Unfortunately fter about 8 hours into the render it quits with a memory
> error "unable to allocate.."
>
> This is the second image I've had the problem on. Both high resolution
with
> HDR environments and radiosity. I'm starting to think that it's the
> additional samples of radiosity during the rendering that's causing the
> memory overload.
>
> I've restarted the rendering with always resample set to off and hope this
> will fix it but won't know for about 8 hours if it did.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Phil Brewer
>
>

Post a reply to this message

"NEWS" <pen### [at] caramailfr> wrote:
> how many light sources do you use ?
>

Currently none. Just the HDR image mapped to a hollow sphere around my
scene. Sorry to not mention that I'm using megapov 1.2.1 for that
functionality.

Radiosity if providing all of the light for my scene.

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P Brewer wrote:
> I'm creating an image that involves a large patch of grass. This eats up a
> bit of my RAM, but the image will parse and start rendering just fine.
> Unfortunately fter about 8 hours into the render it quits with a memory
> error "unable to allocate.."
> 
> This is the second image I've had the problem on. Both high resolution with
> HDR environments and radiosity. I'm starting to think that it's the
> additional samples of radiosity during the rendering that's causing the
> memory overload.
> 
> I've restarted the rendering with always resample set to off and hope this
> will fix it but won't know for about 8 hours if it did.

It might or might not, depending on your settings, scene and your memory 
limits.

You have two options:

- use more reasonable radiosity settings (if the render takes more than 
8 hours with just a patch of grass they most likely are not).
- make more memory available to POV-Ray (by changing your OS settings or 
getting a computer system with larger address space).

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Landscape of the week:
http://www.imagico.de/ (Last updated 01 Jun. 2006)
MegaPOV with mechanics simulation: http://megapov.inetart.net/

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Here's my current radiosity block that crashed:

global_settings {
    radiosity {
      pretrace_start 0.1
      pretrace_end   0.001
      count 50

      nearest_count 5
      error_bound .15
      recursion_limit 1

      low_error_factor .01
      gray_threshold 0.0
      minimum_reuse 0.015
      brightness 1

      adc_bailout 0.01/2

      normal on
      adaptive 1

      save_file "golf_rad.rad"

  }}

The scene consists of three golf balls and a putter sitting on a 2000 blade
square patch of grass mesh copied 580 times to fill the visible scene. I'm
using a focal blur of 90 samples, and the above radiosity. I'm rendering at
1680x1050. Is there any improvement I can make to my radiosity settings to
ease memory usage?




>
> It might or might not, depending on your settings, scene and your memory
> limits.
>
> You have two options:
>
> - use more reasonable radiosity settings (if the render takes more than
> 8 hours with just a patch of grass they most likely are not).
> - make more memory available to POV-Ray (by changing your OS settings or
> getting a computer system with larger address space).
>
> Christoph
>

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Here's a low-quality test-render of the image with a smaller grass density
and no focal blur. Sorry for the white block, but the putter is a
proprietary design and I can't disclose it.

http://www.brewerdigitalarts.com/golf_temp.jpg

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P Brewer wrote:
> 
>       adaptive 1

That's a MegaPOV feature.  And the adaptive pretrace is something you 
have to use with care to make it work successfully.  And in this kind of 
scene it will hardly be very useful.

> 
> The scene consists of three golf balls and a putter sitting on a 2000 blade
> square patch of grass mesh copied 580 times to fill the visible scene. I'm
> using a focal blur of 90 samples, and the above radiosity. I'm rendering at
> 1680x1050. Is there any improvement I can make to my radiosity settings to
> ease memory usage?

That's quite impossible to tell from the settings alone.  Decreasing 
error_bound and nearest_count will surely be what to start with.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Landscape of the week:
http://www.imagico.de/ (Last updated 01 Jun. 2006)
MegaPOV with mechanics simulation: http://megapov.inetart.net/

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Thanks Cristoph. If my current render fails I'll try those tweaks out.

Phil


Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde> wrote:
> P Brewer wrote:
> >
> >       adaptive 1
>
> That's a MegaPOV feature.  And the adaptive pretrace is something you
> have to use with care to make it work successfully.  And in this kind of
> scene it will hardly be very useful.
>

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