MentalRay/64bit/Memory Allocation
polycounter lvl 15
How do you get mentalray to make out with more of your available memory? Right now it's getting to maybe first base by only using about 20% of my available memory, and never even remotely thinking about touching anything past that. What gives?
Increasing tree depths really doesn't offer a significant increase. Increasing the virtual memory doesn't do any good either. The program reads the actual available memory fine when it calculates the memory limit to avoid possible crash and burn scenarios, so yeah... 8gigs installed btw, and it all reads fine by the MB, OS, and other apps.
I know this is probably also greatly due to the actual size of the scene, however, I have tried multiple scenes ranging in various scales, and it seems the larger the scene, the less memory it consumes. I've yet to exceed 2.8 - 3gb... larger scenes are staying under 1.75gb... just doesn't make sense and I've googled the balls out of this issue.
Increasing tree depths really doesn't offer a significant increase. Increasing the virtual memory doesn't do any good either. The program reads the actual available memory fine when it calculates the memory limit to avoid possible crash and burn scenarios, so yeah... 8gigs installed btw, and it all reads fine by the MB, OS, and other apps.
I know this is probably also greatly due to the actual size of the scene, however, I have tried multiple scenes ranging in various scales, and it seems the larger the scene, the less memory it consumes. I've yet to exceed 2.8 - 3gb... larger scenes are staying under 1.75gb... just doesn't make sense and I've googled the balls out of this issue.
Replies
Trace depth is for when you want reflections and refractions to cutoff, i.e. to stop the mirror hall effect, it has nothing to do allocationg more resources, although it will take alot longer to render if you set it too high.
Larger scenes don't always mean longer renders. Stuff like GI, FG, AA and Area shadows are the main culprits for long render times. Poly meshes arn't that heavy for offline renderers.
You need to look under the Render Globals > mental ray > Memory and Performance settings in mental ray.
I use XSI and its called BSP, don't know the maya equivalent but it's still mental ray. There you should be able to allocate more RAM etc. Make sure you leave enough for your O/S and other apps that are running in the background.
Try increasing your bucket size, that should push the RAM and CPU more unless it's capped somewhere in the render options.