Rendering Error - memory error
SenaRe
Posts: 39
I had the same problem when I was using DS4 and I have recently moved to DS4.5. When I render or do a test render I sometimes get:
The renderer encountered a memory error and the program has become unstable. Please close and restart DAZ Studio as soon as possible
What do I need to do to fix this?
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
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Computer, operating system and amount of memory installed, please...
HP, Windows XP Professional and 74.5GB memory with 40.2GB free
That's not memory, that's hard drive space...they aren't the same. Memory is RAM...and you really need at least 2 GB, preferably a full 4 GB to run studio (4 is the max XP can handle).
But, it looks like you are having a problem the RAM. And since this is an XP machine it is old enough that replacement RAM is not going to be cheap.;
Go here...
http://www.memtest.org/
On the download page, download this Download - Pre-Compiled Bootable ISO (.zip). Unzip it and burn it to a CD using the burn ISO feature of your program. Then you reboot your computer with that disk in (you may need to set it boot to a CD) and run the test. If it coughs up any errors, then your RAM (memory) is bad.
Thanks!
I suffer the same problem when rendering bigger scenes. I have checked memory with MemTest and it looked ok. I might check it again later, but I wonder if there might be any other reason, like for example some Windows configuration limiting memory per process. I know there is such option in Linux and FreeBSD, but I couldn't find any specific information for such option in Windows. My system configuration is following:
- Core 2 Duo 2x 1.6GHz
- 2GB RAM Dual Channel
- 16GB swap file on dedicated partition on SSD drive
- Windows XP SP2
- DAZ Studio 4.0 Pro
Last time I checked on Windows Task Manager, DS had taken about 750MB with just a scene loaded, and after running the render, it was properly preparing to render until it reached 1020MB when it crashed with the same message as in first post. In the moment of memory crash, Task Manager reported about 700MB free physical memory and plenty of swap space.
Can it be some system configuration problem, or should I test the memory once again?
A swap file is NOT a substitute for actual RAM. This is very important to remember. Windows swaps the data in and out from the Hard drive to actual memory, meaning it's only really storing a copy of the memory on the hard drive, not actually using it as RAM. That's why it's called a swap file.
In short, if you've only got 2Gb RAM, having a 200Gb swap file means it has to try and micro manage all of that excess memory by swapping it in and out of a mere 2Gb storage limit. With rendering, that's a hell of a lot of work since it requires the majority of the data for processing. This will cause a PC to either grind to a halt or fail altogether.
Long story short. Get more RAM.
This would be the case if my render actually managed to tap into the swap space. But in the case I've described, DAZ Studio takes only 1GB, leaving almost another GB free, and it breaks down. My experience from linux/BSD servers is that when the process runs out of physical RAM, it grows into swap, and just becomes terribly slow. Only if there is a system-wide limit of maximum memory per process, they die before using up all available memory.
I can believe that upgrading to 64bit platform would probably solve the problems, but changing the hardware is out of my reach for the moment, and 2GB RAM is the maximum supported amount on my current motherboard. If I saw the Studio dying when it takes all available memory, or going onto swap, I'd be more convinced the extra RAM would help. Right now I'm afraid that having 3 or 4GB (which is not so easy on 32bit platform) would just lead to DS dying after consuming 1GB and leaving remaining 2GB unused just like now it leaves 700MB.
I set up the huge swap file just to test if it can help at all, but processes didn't seem to grow large enough, even to take up all the physical RAM.
I have this same problem quite often. Usually when I add more then 2 lights, use a ray traced shadow, or a actual scene (like the DAZ Environment). It doesn't matter if I try to do a test render or an full render I will still get the error and Daz Studio crashes. It's gotten to the point where I always save my scene before I hit any render buttons and rarely bother setting up a complex scene if I'm just going to end up having a saved scene that Studio won't render.
I'm running,
~ Windows Vista Ultimate
~ 32-bit
~ Intel Core 2 CPU 2.13 GHz
~ 4.00 GB RAM
~ 142 GB free on hard drive
~ GeForce 7300 SE/7200 GS Graphics card with 1647 MB of graphics Memory
~ Daz 4.5 Pro
So if this problem is based on lack of RAM as HeraldofFire says then why am I having this problem as well? Or is it something else?
Throw everything you think about RAM that you know in the toilet when it comes to Daz Studio.
2 GB Is barely enough to get Studio 3.x to function properly in a 32 bit OS with two or more Gen 4 figures. DS4.x is even worse, it has a bigger footprint and it's memory management leaves room for improvement . Yes, theoretically a level 3 page file swap should elevate the lack of physical RAM, but in theory an elephant can dangle from a cliff with his tail tied to a daisy. 2 GB total addressable RAM in a 32 bit OS and you still need RAM for the OS, for swaps, for TSR's, for other apps running. Kick off a render in DS and you've just diminished your available RAM because now 3Delight needs all of your CPU and as much RAM as it can get it's greasy little paws on. You will discover what 1,000 other users have found: That stupid please wait .... crash or a runtime C++ error or "boom! Desktop!!!"
So without buying a new computer or more ram here are your free options.
If you are running a 32 bit OS with more than 2 GB RAM you will need to manually switch it to use more than 2 GB RAM, otherwise Windows will not use that RAM even if it sees it.
Here's an awesome article on how to do that here from the good folks at Autodesk
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=9583842&linkID=9240617
Render with Standalone 3Delight outside Studio with Studio closed. This will save copious amounts of RAM when you have little to spare.
This process limits you to 2 CPU cores, you can't change that unless you want to pay 3Delight $2,500.00 US
here's how to do this (Keep in mind you no longer need to take out a license)
http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=1758895
I had no problems with spot render preview, even if the scene included massive scenery, moderately heavy figures and raytraced shadows. I also tried to export to RIB and render outside DS, I've almost managed to render it on Pixie (which is free with no cores limited), but it sometimes hanged up, probably because of heavy use of displacements and raytraced shadows. Also exporting DS animation to RIB is tricky and consumes ridiculous amounts of diskspace.
Comparing to standalone renderer, DS works quite efficiently, it's a bit faster with preparing each frame, because a standalone renderer needs to rebuild the whole scene from scratch for every frame, even if I used RIB instancing where possible, DS was faster to start rendering the frame. The only problem is this 1GB memory limit even with seemingly a lot of free memory left.
Maybe it's just Task Manager fooling me, and there is more than 1GB taken when DS crashes - I'll have to check it with Sysinternals Process Explorer later.
I never had DS outperform the standalone in speed, but everyone's mileage will vary. This workflow was more efficient for me because I could offload a render to another computer while I continued working on the system with DS, both were dual cores, one with 2GB RAM the other 3, both on XP, however the system that was doing the rendering was an iMac and when I rendered in the OS X native 3Delight it was faster than the Windows XP in native mode, with the 3GB switch, with nothing running except an OS and a stripped down checklist of services. Some other users have said the Unix version of 3Delight is faster than Windows version but I have not tried that.
and yes, raytraced shadows on bumps will have an immediate effect on your render speed. Displacements with raytraced shadows will grind my i7 8 core with 12GB to a crawl and in some instance it will still crash Studio,
I'm not surprised that my renders take a lot of resources - with shadows and displacement in massive sceneries I often kill a 64bit linux machine with standalone renderer, but back to DS running 32bit Windows, I would just expect it to crash after consuming about 1.5-1.8GB of RAM, not just 1GB. Better, I'd rather expect it to gently get on swap after using up the physical memory. It would be too slow on swap to be useful, but it should work with swap memory instead of crashing, and in particular when there is still a few hundred on MB free memory.
So I suspect some wrong Windows settings limiting memory per process if it's not a bug in DS itself.
It does try to swap...but the way Windows manages the swapping just makes a big mess of things. I frequently can get very RAM heavy scenes done in the standalone under Linux, with swap usage that would bring a Windows machine to a screaming halt, at the first move to the swap. Basically Windows moves stuff to the swap not based on how important it is, but rather is it a part of Windows itself or not...any part of Windows has extremely low priority for swapping (it will almost never swap the 'kernel'). This often results in 'active' items being sent to the swap file and with DS or 3Delight, that is not a good thing.
Quite simple :
I have had memory error with a scene with more than 4 genesis characters and 15 -obj files made in TreeBuilder Modeler 6.2.2.
I just 'break' the scene in separate files, each figure and object in it's own scene, copy lights etc... and render one by one, glueing the scene back together in Photoshop using the DAZ-PS Bridge.
OR delete every other figure/object and render just one, then do it again on other figures/objects and Bridge.
Easy, simple, and fast.
Each render about 1-2 min when rendered separately, and I can fool around with the lights seeing it all in Photoshop at the same.
Bad thing is , I don't know how to use DazBridge to import ground shadows, but that's easy enough to make in PS later on.
PS CS6 has a cool 3d layer propertie that you can import whole DAZ scenes into Photoshop, but unfortunately that takes a very lot of RAM and the best graphs card, which I don't have either, so I suggest Bridge to all having memory issues.
Cheers.