Digital Art Zone

I know I have posted something about this a while ago but can not locate the original post - so sorry if it appears here again.

This is something different though…

I have been adding stones and trees to my scene - only about 10 stones and 10 trees but all of a sudden I got out of memory messages popping up.

I thought - OK save and reload.

It would not save…

So I thought - increase the undo limit and try again.

FOR THE LIFE OF ME - I cannot locate anywhere where I can up the UNDO limit.  Whether it’s right in front of me and I am not looking right - or I am confusing it with a Hexagon question I asked in another group - I do not know… but anyway I cannot see where I can up this.

I have 16Gb ram installed and 1TB of hard drive and I am using LAA utility but no good.
The scene is not that elaborate as yet, I HAVE seen more complex ones…
For the picture so far - it is attached below…

Not in Bryce, you have no control over the undo limit.  Essentially, there is no limit… which in itself can cause an issue.  The scene looks promising though I don’t yet see enough to explain how you ran out of memory - unless there is a lot more in this scene beyond the scope of the camera?

Extremely high res texture mapping will be an issue too if you have used them.
Although it’s always good to have high res textures, beyond a certain limit all they are doing is taking up memory.

Looking at your scene it’s coming along really well, I can’t see anything obvious that would be causing the out of memory, which is why I’d be looking at optimising the textures (which we already know you got outside of Bryce and may simply be too big for your purposes).

TheSavage64 - 15 October 2012 02:43 PM

Extremely high res texture mapping will be an issue too if you have used them.
Although it’s always good to have high res textures, beyond a certain limit all they are doing is taking up memory.

Looking at your scene it’s coming along really well, I can’t see anything obvious that would be causing the out of memory, which is why I’d be looking at optimising the textures (which we already know you got outside of Bryce and may simply be too big for your purposes).

On this very topic I have been doing some recent tests.  It is no good compressing your textures for Bryce, because Bryce handles them in its own way with a lossless compression.  So an original bmp texture with a footprint of say 34 mb compressed to 4 mb jpg externally, will ironically have the same or a larger memory foot print than the original image before compression.  Horo can explain the technical reasons for this, if you need to know, but otherwise I’m just saying the only way to reduce the overhead of high resolution images is to reduce their pixel x pixel dimensions, you can’t do it through converting them to jpgs or anything alone those lines, because Bryce will just undo all that once it gets them into memory.

Yes, once Horo explained that to me I make my texutres in PNG format, as that way I get an automatic alpha map. I only make jpgs if I am also setting them up for others to use in DS or Poser.

Because I use PNG i find I can make the textures smaller in “physical” size and still maintain crispness as they don’t suffer from jpeg compression artefacts.

Yes, sorry I didn’t make that clearer.
I too have found that compressing picture textures is pointless, the only way to do it correctly is to reduce the physical pixel x pixel size in a photo editor.

So to optimise the texture for the building walls for instance, you’d have to work out roughly the pixel dimension of the wall and use that as the maximum size of your texture. If the wall is no bigger than 1200px square, there is no advantage to having a picture texture that is physically bigger than that.

The undo-buffer grows and grows and grows until all memory is exhausted. The only way to clear it is closing Bryce (after having saved your work) and then start it again. There is no other way.

Bryce does everything in memory. No matter how compressed a picture may be, it will be expanded to a bit map. Best is to scale the picture in an external program so that it is large enough to look good in a render but not larger to preserve memory. The picture size in memory will be width x height x 3 (for the 3 colours).

Bryce saves a scene in a non-lossy compressed format. The file size is therefore no indication how much memory the scene uses. If your scene has almost used up all available memory, you may not be able to save the scene anymore because the scene is compressed in memory, using up yet more of it, before it is saved on the HD. Then, the memory is released again.

And even if using the program to force a 32 bit app to use more memory, it isn’t a perfect solution, so you may not be getting full access to all the system RAM…in other words, you may still be limited to only a fraction of what you have…somewhere between 2 to 3.5 GBs.

The hard memory limits of being a 32 bit app are probably one of the most restricting things when dealing with Bryce, even with the workarounds and ‘fakes’ it is still, when all is said and done ‘memory challenged’...for large textures/scenes.