[Tan Boon Meng]

Hi,

I have question about Ram usage. Seems like most of my projects that i did, the Ram usage was pretty high. Wondering is it due to how Maxwell handle it or was it my techniques used?

Example A:

Most objects removed for easy ref

Yellow and white panels are lights. Ceiling lights were cloned from a single object and enlarged 3X.
Yellow lights were cloned as well

Im rendering it at 3500pixels X 4000pixels, and it took out 22Gb ram.
Textures were less than 150mb


Example B:


Yellow panels are lights. Some lights were enlarged and reduced in size. And they were cloned from a single object.

Im rendering it at 7000pixels X 7000pixels, and it took out 7Gb ram.
No textures.


So im wondering, which is the one that took out the most ram usage to the least?
was it Clone light panels, Textures, polygon counts then rendering size?

Whats the best way to reduce Ram usage? Example (which i have yet to try it out), lights shouldnt be cloned from a single object, instead it should be modeled as a whole, lets say 4 X 3 light panels.

Regards.

[Mihnea Balta]

Are 22 Gb and 7 Gb the memory usage numbers for the Maxwell process? Do you have multilight enabled?

If you're using ML and the light panels are separate objects, they will be considered independent lights, so each will use its own buffer. If the panels are clones, they are merged into a single light source and a single buffer is used, so the memory usage will be reduced substantially.

[Tan Boon Meng]

Yes, when Maxwell was rendering.

And yes, multilight was enabled.

All lights were cloned from a single object. So means, example A there were only 3 light emitters used, rest were cloned. And for example B, only 1 light emitter, rest were cloned too. So does it mean that lights/ML arent the thing that took out so much ram?

[Tan Boon Meng]

Hi Guys,

I did some tests and i found out why it took out so much Ram and i thought it will be good to be shared.
Below are the tests that i did.

1) First test scene: Render same scene again to confirm the ram usage.
2) Second test scene: Maintain the same scene but remove all textures (to troubleshoot if the textures are the problem causing)
3) Third test scene: Maintain the same scene but change the "color and intensity" under multilight panel to "intensity" only.

All scenes rendered in 3500 X 4000 pixels.
Results are.

1) First test scene: 22Gb ram used, same as before.

2) Second test scene: 21Gb ram used, so textures are not the one taking much ram.

3) Third test scene: Only 4.84Gb ram used! so this is the culprit. I cant believe the "color and intensity" will take up additional 17Gb of ram. Is there a reason why it needs so much ram?


Regards.

[Mihnea Balta]

Color ML needs to store way more data per pixel than intensity ML. That's just how it is and there's not much that can be done about it. The data is already compressed, uncompressed it takes about an order of magnitude more memory.

[Tan Boon Meng]

No worries, as long i know where the ram goes to and i will take note on it on my next creation.
I can always set a color to the emitter before i set render. : )

Thanks Balta