Out of Memory question

ryanfaintich-2231717

Hi!

I started getting the dreaded "out of memory" prompt when trying to add more 2d pictures to use for textures. I'll give a quick summary of the important specifics. I'm creating one of those old Bingo cages/machines. Now, I have to have roughly 70 or so of those balls in there, and each ball is drawing from a specific image, which I've imported as jpegs (they're each about 1meg or so)

I'm running a brand new mac, running the newest version of Parallels, and I'm using Bryce 7.1.

Couple questions, I heard a rumor that Bryce hates jpegs, and this might be the problem, so is it a good idea to go convert all of these jpeg files to tiffs, and then probably size them down a lot.... Will that solve this problem, or is the problem that I'm importing 70 different 2d pictures, with of course, 70 different simple spheres (not to mention the different objects that make up the bingo cage....)

Any help is greatly appreciated! Heartbreaking! I've run into a virtual dead end with this file & project....

Thanks so much!

Dave Savage

Hi.

No, Bryce doesn't hate .jpgs... What it does though is to uncompress them in its own file structure so any jpg compression you add is pointless really as it's immediately undone by Bryce when you import it.

The thing to do is to make all your pics no bigger than they need to be in your finished render.
So for instance if your finished render is going to be 1000px wide, your bingo balls will be a lot smaller than that, so make all your jpgs 500px. Then you will find that the file size is only about 250k uncompressed. That'll save you a ton of memory and you shouldn't see any depreciation in quality of the finished render.

Also bear in mind when working, that Bryce does EVERYTHING in memory. So the longer you keep it open and work with it, the more it's memory buffer will fill up. Save regularly and restart Bryce often to clear the memory buffer, especially if you're about to execute a particularly memory intensive action (such as using the Instance Lab or Rendering).

Hope this helps.

ryanfaintich-2231717

Huge help!

There's no manual way to clear the Bryce Memory Cache is there? (bear in mind using Parallels)

Thanks so much, I just wanted to make sure that if I was going to resave all the images as smaller files (and more importantly, spend the time to do that, and then alter and rearrange my 2d library in the bryce file) that it wouldn't be all for naught.... Honestly, I could reduce each image to 10% of the previous size and it wouldn't hurt the quality....

Thanks so much!

Rashad Carter

ryanfaintich said:

Huge help!

There's no manual way to clear the Bryce Memory Cache is there? (bear in mind using Parallels)

Thanks so much, I just wanted to make sure that if I was going to resave all the images as smaller files (and more importantly, spend the time to do that, and then alter and rearrange my 2d library in the bryce file) that it wouldn't be all for naught.... Honestly, I could reduce each image to 10% of the previous size and it wouldn't hurt the quality....

Thanks so much!

The buffer holds 15 actions. Some actions use more memory than others. What I like to do is to replace the 15 steps it holds with low memory actions. So to "clear" my buffer I usually just create a sphere, resize it about 15 times, then delete it. Memory usage will drop , but this is not fully ideal as in a short time the usage will increase again most likely.

Dave Savage

No sorry, the only way to clear the memory buffer is to quit and restart Bryce. You don't have to quit Parallels though or restart the Mac.. so it's only a quick task to. Certainly quicker than dealing with a crash or hang.

With regard to changing your pics: It's always worth saving the original large ones too (just in case anything goes wrong) so, if possible save the Bryce file you have and then do a "save as" and add a number 1 at the end. Then as you work on the file if you use the 'save as' instead of the 'save', Bryce will automatically increase the number and you will have the Bryce doc at each stage you saved it (very useful if you need to go back to an earlier version of the document you are working on).

If you're using Photoshop to edit the jpg files, you can automate it and batch process them.
It's as simple as recording your actions on the first one and then setting up a batch process using that set of actions.
Then just sit there and watch as Photoshop does the other 69 of them for you... or leave Photoshop to it while you go make a cup of coffee.

Horo

One of the nastier things I observed is if you click on an object in the object library, but leave the library without accepting, the object is loaded into the memory nevertheless. If there are elaborate objects in the library and you click on several of them, you may run out of memory before you can even get out of the library.

ryanfaintich-2231717

I just wanted to thank everyone who replied with some really helpful tidbits! Thanks again!

I always save the bryce files in increments..... (my hard drive is a mess) so that's the good news there, and I did in fact batch process everything in photoshop! I guess the time consuming thing is just reestablishing those adjusted pics in Bryce.... (I am under the impression that once you load in a picture into the 2d library it imports; so the bigger versions are still there in older versions of the file, and I have to manually edit the 2d library in bryce to update the changes..... If I'm wrong, definitely let me know)

Thanks for all the advice, to everyone, for the helpful ways to clear the Bryce Memory Buffer, that will definitely help me out down the road!

All the best and thanks again,

pierrepiCASSO

I have had many had out of memory running bryce32bit on 64bit os with 16gb memory. Google for program called "large address aware" and try it along side when rendering big in bryce.Not in all but in most cases it will cease that annoying terminus of an "out of memory message."

Horo

You're right. Most of us having at least 4 GB memory have Bryce (and a couple of other 32-bit programs) made large address aware. It's only a flag to be set, after all. Instead of 2 GB, Bryce can use around 3.5 GB. If you exceed that, you get again an out of memory message.