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Out of Memory bug on OpenGL Animation


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This is starting to be pretty annoying?

VW 2014 is a lot better at OpenGL than all previous versions, as the official feature list says.

I am a bit of a fan of animations and always used to use OpenGL because it was so fast, even though the quality suffered compared to Renderworks.

I have tried on numerous occasions to put together an animation in VW 2014 and after, at most, 200 frames I get the dreaded out of memory warning and a big crash after which the file will not save.

Why?

It doesn't happen on any Renderworks mode or Wireframe and would make an enormous difference to my workflow.

Fast Renderworks vs OpenGL is something like a factor of 20 - 40 times faster. Meaning hours rather than days for an animation.

Can anyone help?

Matt

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Aha!

I ran a test on an old White Macbook with no discrete graphics card and it flew through a couple of thousand frames without blinking.

After much head scratching I have worked out why.

The animation in Vectorworks creates the video at exactly the screen resolution and size of the open window in Vectorworks.

i.e. if I shrink the Vectorworks window down and then create an animation I get a small video on playback.

I was working on a 27inch iMac, running the Vectorworks window to fill up the screen and 2560 * 1440 was just too big.

I could either:

a) manually shrink the screen but that would just be guesswork and could take a while each time OR

b) change the resolution of my screen.

After much tinkering it seems 1600 * 900 with the VW window maximised for a landscape A3 (Ledger for my American friends) is the best you can get before the memory death spiral begins

It doesn't seem to have much to do with render quality or even shadows but I haven't done too much experimenting yet.

So I have an answer but would it be possible to just input something to say you would like 1080p output regardless of the screen resolution?

Matt

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I agree that would be useful. However, I'm thinking that once the memory issue is resolved, such a look ahead will not be necessary, and I know the fix for the memory issue is approaching rapidly.

Submitting it regardless, in case I am cataclysmically wrong!

Edited by JimW
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An SP fix for this Jim would garner a whole ton of support from the base.

An out of memory bug that we're seeing just doesn't happen with other software - and VW is out in the cold when it comes to crashes.

I do hope those at the helm realize the credibility benefit in seeing this as an SP necessity rather than an upgrade carrot.

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Not sure if I should start a new thread with this but I have also found that the classes settings when performing an animation all seem to be set by the view that you have open when you start the animation.

e.g. if I have lights turned off in the view on screen, when I start the animation, if they are turned on in the saved views used in the animation, they stay turned off?.

And as a final point, how many point lights can you have on at any one time?

I have a total of 14 in the model and above about seven on at once they start turning themselves off as the graphics card can no longer cope.

Or at least that's what it appears??

Matt

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  • 4 weeks later...

I just bought a Mac Pro and installed VW 2014 on it. I tried to render a drawing in OpenGL and Fast Renderworks and it gave me the "Out of Memory' error message in both cases. I have 32GB of memory and the activity monitor was showing 13GB when I got the message. This same file was fine in VW 2012 rendering mode on my iMac which only has 8GB of memory.

Could it be the Renderworks App itself rather than the memory?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

There is much peddling occurring as we speak.

The error you are getting isn't actually your machine running out of memory, just Vectorworks hitting the maximum memory it is capable of using at the moment. If you like, send us the file at tech@vectorworks.net and we can see if there is any way to get it rendering for you currently.

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