Ireal Animated Clouds gigantic Ram Usage
Diaspora
Posts: 514
So, I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong.
I load just one instance of iReal Animated Clouds, assign one of the aniblocks to the ireal animated cloud, bake to studio keyframes and then save and close.
I try to open the scene that has nothing but the aforementioned keyframe animated cloud and I am getting catastrophic ram usage bringing my PC to its knees, over 50 gigabytes of ram usage. Is there some kind of obvious mistake that I made? Please help, the clouds look amazing and it's supposed to be a lightweight resource, just 240 polygons, but I can't use such a ram hog in an animation, there's no ram for anything else.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
https://www.daz3d.com/ireal-animated-clouds
I don't have thiss et so I am not sure what is animating, but potentially if it has a separate value for each element on each frame that is a lot of data even with low resolution models.
It's some planes with opacity maps.The animation seems to be just moving the planes and changing sizes via the various morph sliders on it,of which there's 1000.
While i'm not getting the same ram usage, there is a massive jump when i reload, but only if i convert to timeline.
Working in studio, seed 1 with the aniblock applied, uses ~600MB total for studio per task manager.
If i save then reload, there's no increase in ram.
Bake to keyframes, then reload and my usage jumps to over 12GB.
Looking at the timeline, it's just a solid line of T from begining to end with no gaps on all 1000 morphs and 1000 keyframes of the particula aniblock.
I'm thinking this is the problem, but i'm not sure on why OP might be seeing that much ram usage compared to what i'm getting.
Bake to Timeline does bake every single frame, yes, so the solid line is expected.
Alright, so it sounds like the winning ticket is to just not bake to studio keyframes, according to task manager, ram usage is barely affected by the presence of aniblocks in AniMate 2
The reason I bake to studio keyframes though is that in the past, I got burned once, where I had an asset with an aniblock in a scene file, and then I proceeded to animate in the timeline and when I reopened that scene file later, I had found that everything on the timeline after the extent of the aniblock in AniMate2 hadn't been saved, that the range of the scene file was actually just the range of the aniblock. I didn't know how to fix that and my workflow ever since was to just bake what I wanted into the studio keyframes, scrub AniMate2 out of the scene file, and then move on from there.
Has anyone else had this issue? How do I prevent AniMate 2 from imposing a narrower than intended range onto a scene file and culling all outside range keyframes?
One workaround that I can share with the forum is that I load in the cloud and the aniblock, then set the timeline to 5 FPS, and bake to studio keyframes and am left with a scene file that when loaded only costs 400 megabytes of ram. The aniblock seems to be made for 30 FPS, if I understand correctly, but especially considering the fog is intended to just be a background asset anyway, with the keyframes baked at 5 fps, then played back at 30 fps, the results look passable, especially as background flavor.