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

Hey Gil,

I have no doubt there are memory leak problems still with PW but,...

I noticed you past question,.. Did you enable your "Options/Document Properties/Memory Management? And, increase the 100 default to something like 500? (I don't remeber what the rules were but Ed Eaton and a few other discussed this?)

BTW, your diamond material,.. are you using the Illumination - "Dielectric Advanced"? That should help with some render times and memory allocation?

And yes, SW2007 is a bit faster and the materials look a bit nicer,.. you'll have to manually change them from the old material to the new materials. Also, animator is a bit nicer... still both PW and Ani need a mahjor overhaul!!

Good luck!..

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

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

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.

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

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