Although I've rendered some long animations in the past I've never noticed
this behavior before.  Apparently, successive frames rendered using the same
scene file require an incrementally larger amount of RAM to render.  I am
using a much larger scene than I've tried in past animations (10,795
objects), but I don't understand why that would cause memory usage to
increase from frame to frame, unless it's just more noticeable due to the
large scene.

If I stop the animation and then restart it at the frame where it left off
the restarted animation starts off using much less RAM, even though the same
frame, before being stopped, could have been using twice as much RAM.

It may be unnecessary, but to illustrate my point I've posted some shots of
the Task Manager resource graphs.  In Graph1.GIF the render is started at
about 1/3rd of the way into the graph.  The RAM usage after the render
begins is around 300 MB.  Graph2.GIF shows the same render, now 45 frames
later, and with no programs other than POVWIN running.  The RAM is now
plateauing around 600 MB per frame, and can be seen to still be increasing
from frame to frame.

Incidentally, I'm using version 3.5.icl.win32, on Windows XP Pro.

So, is this a known behavior?  Is it different in versions 3.6+?  Could
there be anything peculiar about my scene file causing this?  (The only
thing changing in this case is the look-at position of the camera.)

Any help is appreciated.

Post a reply to this message

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 22:44:14 -0700, "CV" <dav### [at] gmailcom> wrote:

>Incidentally, I'm using version 3.5.icl.win32, on Windows XP Pro.

There is your problem. I had the same one, as a work-a-round I wrote
several INI files that rendered subsets of the frames consecutively
and used the file queue to run them. I've not rendered many large
animations in 3.6. I still use 3.5 a lot as Moray is more stable with
it. Using Task Manager the memory usage is a rough saw wave :-)   

Regards
        Stephen

Post a reply to this message