#Page faults, page faults
12 messages in this thread
Hello everyone,
So I'm working away here and, well, to put it bluntly, I have no friggin'
memory! Actually I have 16megs, but I'm getting upto 32000kb worth of page
faults, and have a good ten meg swap file happenin. And all this after only one
rendering. Needless to say, the file is big (upwords of 25000 faces).
So the question I have is, short of doubling memory, what are your tips and
tricks to saving space? When in the keyframer, should I hide all objects not in
frame from the TRACKSinfo box? Will that save time? I just rendered an image,
fairly uncomplex with a few objects in camera range, at hi quality: 13 minutes.
Now understand, I'm not complaining. I'm the guy with the high ambitions. But I
would love to third this down, at least now in testing…
And I'm starting to think about final rendering. WHAT AM I GETTING MYSELF
INTO!!
James ('Listen to that hard drive fault!') Tichenor
What are you up to? 25,000 faces is not that big a file, relatively
speaking, and you must be using lots of textures, automatic
reflection maps, and raytraced shadows to get to 26 megs of
memory/swap used.
If I were you, just get the memory! The amount of time it will save
you on not only this project but all future ones is well worth the
investment now. The extra time you will spend either cleaning it up
or rendering will pay for the 16 megs two or three times on this
project alone!
Greg Pyros
You're right Greg, I've almost talked myself into the memory.
Almost… But I'm not actually doing much raytracing or automatic
reflection maps. In fact, the 12 minute rendering with 8meg swapper
was a door, a brass handle with a mapped reflection map, a couple
boxes and the edge of a bookshelf. Of course there was a bunch of
other stuff behind the camera. I wonder if I hid all those if the
renderer would calm down a bit?…
16 megs is just not enough memory to do most renderings in 3D Studio,
especially R3. Try using very small texture maps, preferrably gif's
and JPG's wherever possible, don't use shadows or reflections, use as
few lights as possible, keep your meshes at very low density…
basically constrain the HELL out of yourself. Or buy some more
memory. I've got @ 32megs in my machines and hardly ever swap out,
though I do in large meshes with large texture maps.
Hi John,
Yeah, I'm really sinking into the idea of another 16megs. This is just
insane. I loose all sense of rhythm working this slow. And I really
don't want to contrain myself – this project is meant to show off
myself and 3DS in the very best way. Yeah, I guess I should…. But
$1000! Doouuh! <g>
James
You can get 16megs (4 4 meg simms) for less than $600 here in the SF Bay Area.
Most of the places do mail-order, too.
If you need specifics, let me know.
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
Hey John,
We actually went for it this morning – got 16 more. In Vancouver it's
about $210 per 4meg chip, so about $850 before taxes (add another
14%). We had $350 credit on an old hard drive, that brings the price
down some more.
I'll tell ya, slapped the old mem in, rendered my 12 minute
picture…. 4 1/2 MINUTES!!! Oh yeah, now it's time to get at it!
Now if only I could get these stinking screens to redraw quicker
(what, Liquid What? How much? Ahhhhhhh! <g>)
James:
Glad you did it! It will definitely increase your overall performance, and
help your disposition!
Welcome to the big-time rendering world!
Greg Pyros
Yeah, I improved my rendering by 3x! But of course that means nothing
when two hours later I crash the system so good, I can't get into no
how! So I'm off to the Computer Doctor this morning (I'm writing from
a whole nother system).
Hey, does anyone know anything about Motherboard bios incompatibility?
James,
I discovered one thing you may look at. Are you using a projector light? If you
are see if the machine starts paging when 3DS says "hmmm… something about
Normals" in the Render dialog box. I've had this happen where it just sort of
eats all your memory with a projector light that's using a high resolution
bitmap.
Dave Mennenoh
<<see if the machine starts paging when 3DS says "hmmm… something about
Normals" >>
Does the machine actually say this?!? That's a strange system message… <g>
But I will give it a try. I have one set where I may use a bunch of projector
lights. But I just upgraded memory, so I wonder if the effect will be the same.
Hi James, yeah I know "hmmm… something about normals" is a rather strange
message but hey it was late and my vision may have been blurred. <g> Really,
though it starts paging there and keeps doing it. I've found large projector
bitmaps to be the cause. This was happening at Adesk (hi Jack <g>) when I was
at dealer authorization and I'm pretty sure they only had 16Mb of RAM. Now that
you've upgraded your memory hopefully you won't have that problem.
Dave Mennenoh