Slowly turning black

[SacSurfin']

I have been working on the rendering for some clients of ours with are relatively large average 140-200 mb. But after a number of quick check renders the background starts to change to black and my grass plane also. I reboot and all is well for a few renders then once again things start going black. It's very annoying, coupled with the time it takes to do a final render. A few hour project turns into a day or so. Any suggestions?

[Guest]

Is there any way to filter out the uncessary objects in the document?

It's using a ton of memory to process that .. and you are running out of memory, which is why you are getting the black stuff.

[SacSurfin']

I've tried everything I can think of, I've purged numerous times and can't get rid of anything else. These are very detailed 4000 sq. ft. homes and with all the nessacary plants to build the scene I'm stuck. I've also deleted all detail from the home not seen in the shot

[SacSurfin']

Also, do you have any idea if there's a point where you can have to much memory. The new G5 (The Beast) can hold 8 Gigs of memory, and I wonder if I would ever even possiblily need that much and same with video card memory? I feel there's probably a ceiling on what would be useful and what would be wasteful. Thanks,

[Dave Donley]

Hello SacSurfin':

Are the images used for textures and backgrounds very big, pixel width and height-wise?

[LordSobe]

Sac, having too much memory is indeed a waste...you really only want to keep the memory that you need... for high quality renderings and fast renders I believe you'd need (atleast for this time) roughtly 1.5 or 2 GB of RAM...

Just look at the requirements that the programs give you. Always try to have atleast double the RAM requirements. That means you work at the optimum efficiency of the program.

I play a lot of games, and most still only require 256 MB of RAM...I have 512 on my computer and I have yet to ever encounter any major lag or downtimes. The only times I encounter that is when I have a lot more things running than just the game.

Personally, if you want your computer to run any large program (Like VectorWorks) at optimum quality. make sure you aren't running many other programs (and that includes programs running in the background)

Chris K.

Computer Geek.