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Out of Memory bug on OpenGL Animation


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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

It is happening for many users, but its not expected behavior or across the board for everyone.

If you can send me one of the files you're having the problem in (to tech@vectorworks.net) we can have a look and see what can be done. Much of the time there is something that can be done to work around the problem until the real solution arrives.

Edited by JimW
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Those features are indeed coming(Other than Animation of actual geometry, I do not think that is a priority at the moment. If you mean a replacement for Create Animation, that is definitely coming) but in order to get long-standing issues fixed, engineering asks me for example files that exhibit the issue.

If we can analyze what you are experiencing, there is a greater chance of the problems you are encountering being fixed faster.

If I cant get a file where the issue always occurs, identify the specific problem and report it to engineering, it may never be corrected or take significantly longer to be corrected.

If I just go back to engineering saying "memory usage is lame" I wont get a fix, even though it seems like those problems are obvious, they are not. They all have very specific causes and somethings issues that seem related have nothing to do with each other. This is only confirmable with example files along with my reports.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

All the files that come into tech support are destroyed after the case is over. If the file goes to engineering, it remains attached to the case it was submitted to so that engineers and other employees internally can work with it to try and replicate/cause/fix problems, and I believe is destroyed after one or two versions. However if the file is sensitive, we normally submit a small portion of the file that exhibits the issue.

I would certainly not recommend you upload the files publicly here on the forums if they are of a sensitive nature, since anyone can download them in this manner. Normally we have users email them to us (all tech emails are destroyed within 1-3 months purely due to storage concerns, whether they have files attached or not) and then we delete them once the issue is resolved.

More recently, users have uploaded them to their own Dropbox/Google Drive/cloud-storage-of-choice and sent us a download link, which they can kill at any time and the file is then still deleted from our machines after the case is over.

I can not speak to legal agreements at all, but that is just a restriction placed on me by our company practices. Since I am not part of our legal staff, I am not permitted to get into any specifics of that publicly or privately. I don't feel this is intended to be malicious or secretive, just a precautionary measure on management's part which I do agree with.

I can however tell you that the utmost care is taken to protect user privacy, both of their personal identities and their intellectual property. Any time I want to use a file we have seen from a user, I get express written permission from the user to do so and there is a lengthy approval process internally so that our managers make sure all legal bases are covered before we use them.

If anyone here was found to be selling user content, I am pretty sure they'd toss us out a window.

If you want to see about getting some real legalese answers on our protection practices, go ahead and email me a request and I'll get you a response from the proper people here.

(Wow that post got longer than expected...)

Edited by JimW
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  • 4 weeks later...

FWIW I will add my 2 cents, I am trying (have been trying) to render a file for a week, getting out of memory every 5-10mins. It appears to be related to textures so now trying to turn some off. This file consists of a small Site Model, 50 trees, some tex beds. 20-30 3d symbols not much more. Is this too much for VW?

Seems like it is.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Depends on the complexity of those objects. Normally 50 trees would be fine, but if they are 50 trees and 30 symbols with 50,000 polys each, or thousands of vertices each, it can run into problems.

For instance, I have a file with 1 tree that can't even render in Vectorworks, as the tree is 1,372,000 3D polygons. In contrast I have a file with upwards of 5,000 trees that runs like a dream, since each tree is composed of a handful of NURBS surfaces.

Most commonly now what I see is geometry imported from 3rd party libraries composed of thousands of smaller objects. This will be mitigated significantly with the advent of 64bit and access to all your machine's memory, but its still a good idea to reduce their complexity as far as possible if it isn't necessary.

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Vectorworks would be smart to provide new, updated, and more complete symbol libraries. Because some of the existing libraries are very old, and because so much of what we need is lacking, we are pretty much forced to find and download symbols from wherever we can find them, mostly from SU based stuff which are almost always high poly count monsters...

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