DISCUSSION: Computer can't render a large scene

[Rae134]

To me an Artist is someone who Creates (doesn't mean you have to be a good artist ) I know people have different views on this. I haven't done any tradition art in approx 4 years (since I got sick and couldn't hold a paint brush or charcoal) and I missed creating so that's what got me into this 3D thing.

My current job is "creating" artwork for real estate (signs, brochures etc) and is sooo not creative as most are belong to big groups with corporate styles to follow so is basically inserting new pix and text in a template. So 3D has been my creative outlet and I do consider it Art as I've seen some amazing pieces out there (and some not so good).

Like everything, once you learn the technology you can start on the creative process and I'm sure your muse will start talking to you again

I can relate to that Goya quote, I go through dark periods and my art can reflect that sometimes, its like someone else has done them, my style (or lack there of) is very eclectic that way

 

[carmen indorato]

This won't solve your problem right now, but the next time you buy a computer, do not buy a web surfing desktop. Do not buy a gaming computer. Don't even *think* of buying anything 32bit.
Buy a used commercial grade workstation. Look for workstations which have two Xeon processors on the motherboard, preferably hex-core and HyperThreaded.
Search eBay, Newegg, Amazon, et al for "2x X5650", or two X5660, two X5670, X5680, or X5690. A pair of these will give you 24 render threads.

And get one with plenty of memory, at least 32GB. That large amount of RAM is what will give you the capacity to do large scenes.

Urania is my weakest workstation. She has two HyperThreaded hex-core X5660 Xeons (24 render threads at 2.8GHz) and 48GB of RAM; she cost me $1,260. Urania is a 2008 model, and yet she will render faster than a new $10,000 gaming computer, and handle large scenes that would bring the gaming computer to its knees.

For 3D rendering, you want as many processor cores as you can get (to speed rendering), and massive RAM (for large/complex scene capacity). The way to get that is to buy used enterprise gear - a professional workstation. New workstations are frighteningly expensive, but used ones are quite affordable.

I am not really a windows users. Having used it in a high volume high def printing/prepress environment and digital imaging facility before that I have come to hate the platform. Went Mac and never went back.
I bought my recent Laptop a MacBook Pro with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core quad i7 processor and maxed out the RAM at 8GB 1067 MHz DDR3 running in 64bit. At the time it was maxed out. But of course by today's standards it is longer in the tooth. Poser 2014 pro is running at 64 Bit as well and has been pretty stable and powerful until this project came along. I find I have never been able to get on top of the technology game and stay there. It is the wonderfully awful case of forced obsolescence which i hate. I miss my technical and Rapidograph pens and airbrush rig. I miss bending over my multiple drawing boards with mechanical rulers and angle squares and Art-O-Graph projector. I miss my photo studio and my throwing wheel and leather works set up..........
i hate computers the internet and chat rooms and of course My Face and Space Book (A funny) and of course FORCED OBSOLESCENCE!
But to get a decent render so I can expurgate my mental musings I need the damn thing so Eat Crow I must and do the best I can to endure for the dark sake of amusing my "SELF".
Sorry for the rant but you are right of course but in my little broken world money talks greater 3d and wishful BS just rants and remains a whining failure.

 

[Gadget Girl]

I bought my recent Laptop a MacBook Pro with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core quad i7 processor and maxed out the RAM at 8GB 1067 MHz DDR3 running in 64bit. At the time it was maxed out. But of course by today's standards it is longer in the tooth.

If it makes you feel better, you're computer may not be as long in the tooth as you think, at least not from an Apple stand point. My MacBookPro is the first generation of retina machines that came out in 2012. Like you I maxed it out at the time, and it's really iffy if a new machine would be much more powerful. Apple seems to have decided that for 95% of the users the computers are powerful enough and they haven't really added much to them over the last few years except for more SSD storage for cheaper.

Basically you could bump up your 2.66 ghz i7 to a 2.8 ghz i7 for a pretty penny, but they don't even offer more than 16gb of ram on a MBP. That being said, I've noticed I almost never use up all my RAM except when do massive hour long renders. For most of what I do, I still have plenty of free RAM, which is why I think the processors are definitely the most important thing.

 

[carmen indorato]

Thanks for the pep talk dear. Got a smile now going to bed!

 

[carmen indorato]

If it makes you feel better, you're computer may not be as long in the tooth as you think, at least not from an Apple stand point. My MacBookPro is the first generation of retina machines that came out in 2012. Like you I maxed it out at the time, and it's really iffy if a new machine would be much more powerful. Apple seems to have decided that for 95% of the users the computers are powerful enough and they haven't really added much to them over the last few years except for more SSD storage for cheaper.

Basically you could bump up your 2.66 ghz i7 to a 2.8 ghz i7 for a pretty penny, but they don't even offer more than 16gb of ram on a MBP. That being said, I've noticed I almost never use up all my RAM except when do massive hour long renders. For most of what I do, I still have plenty of free RAM, which is why I think the processors are definitely the most important thing.

How do you know about actual ram use while working in apps like poser?
Been thinking about moving up to a new more powerful iMac or the Pro Mac machine. I already have a new 19inch monitor for it but not sure if all my apps on my MBP will work ok in the newer OS.

 

[Gadget Girl]

How do you know about actual ram use while working in apps like poser?
Been thinking about moving up to a new more powerful iMac or the Pro Mac machine. I already have a new 19inch monitor for it but not sure if all my apps on my MBP will work ok in the newer OS.

Sort of tricky, sort of not on the Mac. I say that because the Mac OS is actually pretty smart about how it allocates RAM and releasing it from other programs. The basic way to check RAM usage on a mac is to go to the Utilities folder in Applications and open the program Activity Monitor. Then choose the memory tab. Here's what mine looks like ATM:

So if you look my system (a.k.a. the kernel) is using 1.12 GB of RAM at the moment. I have Poser open with a pretty simple scene, although it isn't wasn't processing anything at the moment I took that screen shot, and so more or less idle it's using 1.04 GBs of RAM. Now it kind of looks like at the bottom that I'm using a little over half my RAM at the moment, but that's not really true. The memory used is kind of deceptive. You see like I said, the mac is pretty smart about memory management. So at the moment it has a ton of stuff cached, because I'm using so little of my RAM actively. That makes it very fast for me to switch between programs, but if I started pushing my memory the computer would quickly dump all that and give the RAM to whatever program needed it.

The best thing to look at is the Memory Pressure. It strange, but actually a very good representation of whether you have enough RAM or not. Memory pressure is a graph with the top meaning the system is using every bit of RAM it has. You'll notice the green part is is pretty close to the bottom. Memory pressure will stay green until it get's about half way up I think. At that point it will turn yellow, and that means that you are pushing things, and that more RAM wouldn't be a bad idea. So lots of older macs like some of the early MacBook Air's that only had 2gb of RAM will often be in the yellow if you just have a web browser open (assuming you are running at least 10.7 or higher. 10.6 only required 0.5 gb of ram, 10.7 needed 1gb IIRC).

If you really push your system you can get into the red. I've done this before with some really intense renders. But that's the exception not the rule. For instance, I just clicked render on the simple scene I had open. Took about 10 seconds to render, and at one point the RAM for Poser did jump up to about 2.34GB (once the render was done it went back down to 1.10 GB, which seems to be about the idle point for PP11).

I next loaded up a scene that I knew would take a long time to render (in fact still rendering) my Memory Pressure has stayed in about the same place even though the render is taking some time. However my CPU load has jumped up all the way to the max (it says Poser is using 766% of my CPU, a little pet peeve of mine. What apple really means is that I'm using all my cores at presumably 95% each). Which goes back to the point about processors. Of course in this case the scene I loaded only had one figure, but she has dynamic hair, hence the processor load. If I loaded up a scene that had lost of figures and textures, I would like up the RAM usages as well as the CPU. Hope that gives you a better sense of how these parts of the hardware interact, at least on a Mac.

 

[carmen indorato]

You mentioned Kernal. I seem to have had some problems with Kernal Panics...when the mac shuts off or restarts in the middle o a process or function as trivial as web browsing.
I got the impression it may have been caused by a defective MicroSoft scroll mouse plugged into the USB port which I read somewhere might cause Kernal panics. So it is either the mouse starting to go (which i had been experiencing weird jumping and twitching cursor issues before the attack) or the USB port might be having issues. I went back to the stupid Apple Mouse mighty mouse with that pathetic dysfunctional whimpy scroll ball (who the hell designed that should be e-spanked!) and so far have not seen the same erratic cursor behavior.
Could this also be an issue with memory?
Usually I do NOT keep too many apps open at once. Poser is always open by itself pretty much so the memory and processors are dedicated only to Poser...sort of a carry-over from the stupid memory greedy days of poser4.

 

[Gadget Girl]

So the kernel is more or less the most basic level of the operating system, actually, there are a lot of kernels to handle different things, USB devices being one of them. Bad hardware can definitely cause a kernel panic. If you haven't seen the behavior with apple mouse, then yes, there's a good chance the other one is dying and causing the issue. If it is the mouse, in the kernel panic log it'll say something like com.apple.drive.AppleUSB or com.apple.iokit.USBfamily (or something close to that). Memory would only cause a kernel panic if you had some bad ram in the computer, which can happen but isn't very common these days.

 

[carmen indorato]

thanks for the info.

 

[Dreamer]

Yes, I've run into that same problem with not being able to pose figures easily as my scenes got more complex. Like Dreamer I often use partial scenes to put together complex scenes.

I'm not sure this scene looks all that complex, but I was using a large cliff prop in Terra Dome 2, and once I added in Dusk, Harry, and also some snow props, it started to get a bit complex. So here's what I did it make it easier to pose the figures.

The Winter Pass

• Gadget Girl
• Apr 10, 2016
• 1
• dusk fantasy harry

Dusk wearing a refit of Littlefox's Lord Snow

First I set up Terra Dome 2 the way I wanted it, and added in the cliff prop that the figures would be standing on. I spend a lot of time getting the cliff placed correctly and getting the camera set up, because I wanted a specific perspective that you get in the mountains when you are on a mountain yourself.

Once I had that stuff placed correctly, I saved that scene, and then saved out just the cliff prop as a partial scene. That kept it's positioning and stuff for me since it wasn't just at 0, 0, 0.

Then I opened the partial scene of the cliff, and worked on getting Harry posed. I actually at this point added in the snow prop they are standing in as well. Once that was done I save out Harry and the snow prop (since that was now effectively my ground) as a partial scene. In that partial scene, I added in Dusk, since he needed to be posed with Harry, the snow, and especially the reins. When that was done I reserved one more time as a partial scene with just Dusk and what he was wearing.

Finally I went back to the scene with Terra Dome and the cliff. I loaded in some other snow props (the falling snow). Then I loaded the partial scene that was Harry and the snow on the ground prop. And then the partial scene of Dusk. Although there was still some tweaking to do at that point, most of the major posing was done, and all the characters were correctly positioned in the overall scene, so it wasn't too painful even though things were slow.

This exactly what I do and am in the middle of doing right now

 

[HaiGan]

Hopping back to the start of the thread- my computer's a pretty good one with a beefed up graphics card but it does slow right down if I ask it to handle a lot of figures in a scene. One trick I use is to pose the first figure as I want then export it as an object file, keeping the material zones and world position data. Then I can delete the figure and import the object instead, which seems to put much less of a load on the machine, and get on with posing the next figure in the scene. Entire figure groups can even be saved as a single object file. You can't make any changes to the pose(s) later on, of course, nor conform other figures to the object, but if you save each figure or group as a separate Poser file you can open that up, tweak and re-export.

 

[carmen indorato]

Thanks for the input HaiGan.
Never thought of exporting as .obj file. Good to know.
I am a silly dial spinner and do series of images so the characters are constantly in a state of moving morphing flux. It would kill me to NOT be able to change them moving from one image in series to the next. But I guess to get the final image I will have to nail down the figures and their interactions.
Will keep that option clear in my dead head.
Thanks!

 

[Willowisp]

Another thing you could consider is to 'clean' the figures of excessive morphs once you are done with them. That will reduce the size of the figure considerably! A fully loaded V4 can be pretty heavy, but there are ways to remove the unused morphs to lighten her. Several ways to do this, and other users are probably better at explaining how than me but one easy way is to use Semidieu's "Advanced Figure Randomizer and INJ builder" available (still) at RDNA. That way you won't need to export as .obj, and you can still pose them.

 

[scatha]

I am getting to the point where my self-built computer conks out during a render and produces those icky blue screens....highly annoying.

My base unit is an AMD FX6350 with 32Gb ram, NVIDIA GTX960 (4Gb) STRIX and two WD RED 3Tb's for storage. (waiting to see what the new Zen architecture will do, before even considering a rebuild)

 

[HaiGan]

Have you run any diagnostics on your hardware- the fault-finding sort, not the performance sort? I've had bluescreens when a component was failing which at first seemed linked to specific software- but it turned out the connection was that only that software was pushing the system particularly hard.

 

[scatha]

Several in fact, as I used to build networks for a living. (15 years experience at HP and a year at Cisco.) The next move is a PSU upgrade... I think my current is causing bottlenecks, due to not able to supply enough power to all components.

 

[carmen indorato]

Hopping back to the start of the thread- my computer's a pretty good one with a beefed up graphics card but it does slow right down if I ask it to handle a lot of figures in a scene. One trick I use is to pose the first figure as I want then export it as an object file, keeping the material zones and world position data. Then I can delete the figure and import the object instead, which seems to put much less of a load on the machine, and get on with posing the next figure in the scene. Entire figure groups can even be saved as a single object file. You can't make any changes to the pose(s) later on, of course, nor conform other figures to the object, but if you save each figure or group as a separate Poser file you can open that up, tweak and re-export.

As I said, that is cool but in D/S there is something called Decimator which from my limited brain pan seems to reduce the density of the mesh for those times lower rez images can be useful. Does Poser have anything similar?

 

[carmen indorato]

Another thing you could consider is to 'clean' the figures of excessive morphs once you are done with them. That will reduce the size of the figure considerably! A fully loaded V4 can be pretty heavy, but there are ways to remove the unused morphs to lighten her. Several ways to do this, and other users are probably better at explaining how than me but one easy way is to use Semidieu's "Advanced Figure Randomizer and INJ builder" available (still) at RDNA. That way you won't need to export as .obj, and you can still pose them.

You can squeak through and also delete those extra morphs individually by hand too. In fact it is a good.
I have for instance built some models with the Meipei Perfect script so I can add all the body fix morphs more easily so if I need them I just open the particular model that has them instead of reinventing the wheel every time. Same can be done for parsed down figures where many of those morph dials as you say have already been removed and save them to library to more easily call them into a scene when needed.

 

[HaiGan]

Several in fact, as I used to build networks for a living. (15 years experience at HP and a year at Cisco.) The next move is a PSU upgrade... I think my current is causing bottlenecks, due to not able to supply enough power to all components.

Ah, yes. We had a spate of issues with a-brand-that-shall-remain-nameless due to them supplying units with a PSU barely rated for the components the unit shipped with. Plugging in too many USB devices was enough to start causing issues.

As I said, that is cool but in D/S there is something called Decimator which from my limited brain pan seems to reduce the density of the mesh for those times lower rez images can be useful. Does Poser have anything similar?

You can reduce the poly count on objects and on individual body parts (it's in the Object menu, and you can tailor the reduction amount), but you can't do a whole figure in a single process (unless someone's written a script for it or something?)

 

[scatha]

Not using decimator, but am using the iray memory manager.