tnpir4000 - 19 September 2012 08:42 AM
I asked this in another forum and it was suggested I repost it in the Bryce forum, so here goes:
I’m working on a system with plenty of RAM (Windows XP Pro, 3GM RAM), and I’ve made sure Bryce 7.1 is LAA-enabled (that utility that got posted a looong time ago), and yet, when saving some large scenes, I still get that damned “Out of memory!” error. The weird thing is that it does the same thing every time—when saving, it gets to 99%, then that error pops up.
Seems to me if it can get to 99% there shouldn’t be anything stopping it from getting to 100%. Anybody else run up against this and know how to fix it?
I suspect the key to your problem is large scenes. That and even though you’re using LAA you’re still not giving Bryce all it can use. I say that because LAA can allow Bryce to use up to either 3.4 or 3.6 GB I’m not sure because I’ve heard both. Either way though that’s more then all the memory you have. So between that and the fact that some of that also goes to running your OS and any other things you might have running (anti virus, IM, media player, etc.), Bryce is still not getting all it can to work with.
Another thing to consider is this, is that a prebuilt machine like a Dell or HP or some brand of laptop? I ask because 3GB is an odd configuration for custom built machines but is common in prebuilt machines that use onboard video. In those cases if say your video card is supposed to be 1GB then that one GB is coming from your 3GB of system memory leaving 2 for everything else. So while you think you’ve got more then enough you don’t You really need at least 4GB preferably 8 and an OS that can recognize that much memory.
Now intially I said your problem may just be large scenes just because it gets to 99% doesn’t mean there is some simple trick that will get you to 100% I understand your reasoning but it doesn’t always correlate that way. Sometimes a scene is too big because it just has too many objects and you really are out of memory. In that case all you can do is remove things until it does work. Sometimes though a scene is too large because of the textures used. Like for example, if you are importing one of the Elite Characters for V4 or M4 to populate the scene, their textures can be quite large in resolution like 4000x4000. A texture that size takes up alot of room and is only needed for extreme close up where you want to be able to count the pores in the character’s skin (not literally just figuratively). Otherwise that texture could be shrunk down to a more standard resolution like 1280 x1280 and everything will still look fine and you’ll use less memory. Of course you could also opt to use a lower resolution figure like say V3 Reduce Resolution or any of the several lorez figures offered at Daz by Predatron.
Now there is one thing that can eat into your memory enough to cause problems and that is the undo buffer, which I believe can cover up to 20 changes made. So if that’s what’s holding you back then the thing to do is save you scene just before rendering, close bryce down completely, restart Bryce and then reload the scene and then do whatever you were trying to do when you got the out of memory error. You unfortunately have to close Bryce to clean out the buffer but doing it that way should free up some memory if you made alot of adjustments to your scene prior to getting the intial error.
There is also a trick for the too many objects problem and that is to render the scene in layers and then combine those layers in like photoshop for example. Like one layer would be your background, another would be whatever figures or the main objects in your scene are and then another might be any additional props to complete the scene. That way Bryce never has to deal with the whole scene.
At this point though if it’s possible your best bet would be to get more memory and an OS that can make use of it. Like if you like XP so much there is an XP 64 although XP is going to fade into history soon so you really should consider upgrading to Windows 7.
