I'm drowning in memory....help! Mayday, i need a plumber quick!

Hi,
I've discussed this issue already in my previous post with Wayne, but I
thought it might be interesting to all of you guys who use PhotoWorks and
Animator.

According to my brother's short diagnostic (he is a system programmer so I'm
pretty sure he knows what he talks about), SolidWorks 2006 sp5.0 in
conjunction with PhotoWorks and Animator suffers from a major "memory leak"
in which no 3GB switch can help - in my case anyway.
Every time I try to render this short animation, the task manager fills with
trash memory until windows can't deliver any more memory, and solidworks
crashes. the last time I've attempted the Page file/commit charge reached
2.93 GB!! most of them from solidworks (I didn't run any other applications
simultaneously).
In case one of you guys wants to replicate this, he/she needs an assembly
with about 50+ parts with many refracting and reflecting materials, GI on,
spherical image on background, high quality AA, ambient light on + 1 spot
light, raytracing set to 2 reflections and 4 refractions.

I hope SW will fix this soon in a new SP for SW2006 (You probably say now
"wishful thinking", ha...), and if not then at least in SW2007.

Cheers,
Gil

 

As I understood it, the maximum memory allocation is supposed to go the
other way - if you are running out of memeory, lower the number. The
number is supposed to set an upper threshold for how much memory PWx
will grab - once it hits the thereshold, it releases some of that
memory from its greedy little clutches and continues.

This is what is is supposed to do - now ask me if it always works (no).
I did use it on a pretty large rendering about a month back and it
saved me from crashing - I set it down to 500MB, and oddly the
rendering finished pretty fast. (aside - it cracks me up that it has
been around for years on an operating system that can only address 4MB,
but you were able to jack it up to 10GB. I used to think that I should
jsut increase it to free up more memory, and of course all it did was
open me up to crashing.)

One last thing - I would suggest lowering your anti-aliasing. Very
High anti-aliasing increases rendering time A LOT, and I recall that it
gobbled up RAM. I haven't used it for years because, frankly, on large
enough images I don't miss it.

Good luck,
Ed

 

Hey Gil,

Hi Paul,

thanks for confirming it........so it is more then a solid suspicion.

No. i didnt toch that because i didnt knew what the heck does it mean.
thanks for pointing me to this. i will try and see if this helps in my case.

No. i used an illumination - glass material and increased the reflectivity
of it and the glossynes of it from the default values and saved it in the
user folder as a custom material. i did so because i thought glass is the
most similar material which photoworks knows which is simmilar to diamonds.

I'm glad to know. so i have something to look forward for...

Thanks.....I need it!

Cheers,
Gil

 

As I understood it, the maximum memory allocation is supposed to go the

This is highly counter-intuitive, and when you add up the fact that the
photoworks documentation is so poor, then there is no wonder that many of us
stumbled across this. but now i'm ready to continue....O.K. got that! thumbs
up....here i (and my old computer) go for another round.

i'll consider that, although i have to get as much rendering quality as i
can from this animation sequance......it suppose to persuade a client of us
to order this piece of jewlery, so it should look pretty damn good on his
screen too.

Thanks,
Gil

 

Hey Paul,

Options/Document Properties/Memory Management
Am I missing something? I don't see it anywhere.

Muggs

 

Bottom of the dialog in 2006. Second from the bottom in 2007. You
have to first click the box 'enable memory settings' to set maximum
memory management

You do know these are PWx options, right? Accessed through the 'hand
of god' icon on the far right of the PWx toolbar.

 

You do know these are PWx options, right? Accessed through the 'hand

AHH! OK Muggs you can stop scratching you little bald head now!

Thanks Ed! No, obviously I didn't know they were PW options. I use
Rhino/Flamingo for my rendering because beating my head against a wall is
not my idea of fun. However I started playing with PW in 07 and it's
actually a LOT more intuitive now. I made something the other day that
looked amazingly like a rendering.

Thanks again,
Muggs

 

Thanks Ed! No, obviously I didn't know they were PW options. I use

No big deal on the options - I am finding myself humbled by how much I
don't know about SWx these days, or where stuff is tucked away - you
almost need to commit to being a SWx encyclopedia and I have, frankly,
gotten lax. I'm glad I picked Swx up in 2007 and have only had to
learn a little bit with each release - I am quite impressed with folks
starting off from scratch. There is just so much now.

And I'm glad '07 PWx worked well for you. Really glad, because my
recent experience with 07 was not so cheery

I took it for a spin on a job on Tuesday evening to take advantage of
the rocking new materials.
After three hours I did what I estimated to be about 45 minutes of work

On Wednesday, I bit the bullet and redid that work in '06 - sure
enough, it was 45 minutes to get back to the same point.
Granted, with new interfaces come logjams (I do not prefer the 06
interface, but at least I know it):
At least 10 minutes was lost overall rooting around for how to set the
default material - nothing in help that I could find (and since when
does the PWx help also include all the SWx help?), and even after I
set it I couldn't see anywhere that told me what the default material
was
20 minutes was lost on trial and error just to get a folder of
pre-existing materials to open and allow access to the materials
(eventually had to close and reopen SWx, which I assumed but avoided
for too long because the load time on the asm was so long)
And then i lost time to some bizarre behavior where, after I made a
custom material, the assembly would reload!!!!!!!! wiping out all my
changes (lost probably an hour to repeated instances of that one)
BTW - don't try to cancel a test rendering that you started (I wanted
to see what would happen with global illumination and it took too
long). At least on Teusday, with this file, it crashed SWx 07 every
time.
I hope my experience was not typical... I am really rooting that under
Biasotti guidance PWx 07 will be a really good package.
Ed

 

Hey Ed,

Thanks for the reply. No my experience was very good. I will usually read
the help only when all else fails.
I'm the kind of person that learns by doing so I will usually just start
dragging things around and clickity clicking on stuff to see what happens
(this also gets me in trouble quite often, as faithful readers will attest).
Well as most of you know that doesn't fly in PW06 but in PW07 that was
working pretty well. That's why I said it was more intuitive, I just drug a
material onto a part in the FM and voila it worked. Kewl! Now as far as the
material controls go they are not (in my opinion) as intuitive, so I'll need
to read up and do some playing around to figure out exactly how they work.

One thing that I can't figure out is why I don't see any shadows! I found a
setting somewhere (it was two days ago) and turned that on but still no
shadows. I'm sure its me, so if anyone else has had this and has figured it
out I would appreciate some guidance.

Thanks,
Muggs

 

well.........I tested the memory limit option in the Photoworks
"options>document options" and set it down from default value to lower
values like 500,100,30 MB... and so on:
There was no difference at all - SolidWorks keeps stocking memory until it
crashes. I think the problem is more fundamental and lies in SolidWorks
itself or Animator. After all, there is only one process running in the task
manager and it is SolidWorks, which in turn runs Animator, which in turn
runs PhotoWorks.

Anyway I gave the attempt up and exported the assembly using STEP format to
Rhino in which I make a poor quality sequence of renderings using Flamingo
add-in. Rhino and Flamingo does a pretty lousy rendering job to my taste but
that's better then nothing (at least they doesn't suffer from such a memory
leak like SolidWorks 2006 SP5, and they manage to finish the rendering
sequence at the end without crashing).

 

Sounds like its broken. Good to know. Not a suprise - if things very
few users actually use fail (or are ridiclously poorly documented) SWx
doesn't ever find out about it.

If you have memory problems:
1st - look at Wayne's articles on the 3GB switch (I only started the
ball on that one, he rolled it into areas I would have never suspected)
2nd - decrease your anti-aliasing. I've done a few very large assembly
renderings lately (10K components) and bolt through them, but I don't
use the highest anti-aliasing even though I DO use indirect
illumination
3rd, if it is a massive assembly, go to document settings and lower the
image quality on tiny components, only having high image quality for
the things that will show the tesselation in the final render. I
figured this out when watching the matrix 2, while a single rendering
was crunching over the weekend while I was in the theater. It stuck in
my craw that they could render all these frames while I couldn't render
even one - on a hunch, I came back on Monday, lowered the image quality
(after the rendering had stalled over the weekend) and got through that
job.
Ed