Carrara 8.5 is a memory-eating zombie from hell (apparently)
PeterH
Posts: 0
This is one for the techies, I think. Anyway, it's got me baffled, which admittedly is not too difficult.
I'm running an iMac with OSX 10.7.5, 4GB RAM.
After numerous hangs with the new version of 8.5, I used Activity Monitor to try to see what was happening. Most of the system report detail is incomprehensible to me, but I concentrated on three things:
%CPU use
Real memory use
Virtual memory use
Any figures below are in that order.
open Carrara: 3.5%, 85.6MB, 70.7MB
new empty file: 1.0%, 126.0MB 115.7MB
which seems reasonable.
close new file: stays the same
open big file (33MB, terrains, shaders - ran fine on the beta version I was using, 179 I think)
100% 1.95GB 3.17GB
The memory figures then increases slowly, with me doing nothing at all to the set-up. The spinning beach-ball of death appears, Activity Monitor says Carrara is "not responding".
For the next five or so minutes the CPU value wanders about between 1.9% and 60%. The memory figures increase to peak at 2.5GB and 6.19GB, there is less than 20MB free system memory. Tense, huh?
I hold my nerve as the Mac shakes and glows cherry red (well, not really). The CPU figure goes to 99.6%, the memory figures drop to 1.08GB and 1.09GB, and Carrara starts to respond again.
Values then fall back to 0.9%, 92MB, 1019MB, and things work until the next hang-up.
Clearly this no way to get things done. As ever, all suggestions gratefully received. Thanks.
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Comments
On Ram, as well as Hard Drive space for saved scenes.
For an example scene
1 camera
1 spot light
1 genesis
1 Ad Gladio for Michael 4
Save scene with "Save locally"
And the file size comes out to 375 MBs. And takes near 10 minutes (on my i7 solid state hard drive) to save.
I created a fantastic scene so I'm very happy with the products.
So I'm not sure if I should expect such large file sizes when I'm NOT saving everything internally.
Cheers!
I am windows not Mac but one thing to try might be edit remove unused objects and consolidate duplicate shaders.
also go to that temp folder in documents Daz 3D and delete everything between use.
I had simillar issues due that folder being full of crap on my old laptop with Carrara7
oh and is your Genesis figure loaded from Carrara smart content browser or a saved .duf imported from studio?
I get huge files sometimes with the latter as all the subdivision comes over, gives me a nice high rez figure but the saves can be dodgy.
I normally save externally and I compress my saves, which adds quite a bit to save time.
Dart,
I thought externally saved all the textures, maps and what have you in the same folder as your saved scene.
More so, "locally" saved just the scene info with references to the imported object's root locations.
If I have it backwards, ok. but then I should have a folder full of extra files. Since saving "internally" should be the one that bloats a file size.
Wendy.
Window's users unite! But alas, it is a Carrara smart content, not .duf. But good idea to watch out for it.
PeterH.
Is it possible that your anti-virus on your Mac is scanning each opened texture file against its virus database? Try disabling it for 10 mins as you open your file.
I had this problem on Windows with Microsofts' "Windows Devender" and "Malicious Spyware" software, so I switched to a different anti-virus.
Thanks for the suggestion everyone.
By a process of elimination, or blind luck, I seem to have fixed the problem. Briefly, I had exported a soft body animated cloth and reimported it to make a "frozen" vertex object. It was part of a set of objects (table, cloth, crockery etc) which I'd made and saved as a group in the browser.
I found the cloth object had about 160,000 vertices, and rendering smoothing was also set, which seemed potentially indigestible. I tried splitting the group up and saving all the components separately, and for some reason this has done the trick. Not sure why, but at least things are working normally again.
Onwards and upwards...
I normally save externally and I compress my saves, which adds quite a bit to save time.
Externally saved files and locally saved files are both good for reducing system overhead, but I think you're confusing externally saved file and locally saved files. What you're describing is locally saved files, as the files are left in their location.
With externally saved files, Carrara will want you to save all the textures in your scene to a folder, and will also ask you to name them.
carrara is a nice software but sadly it is full of bugs and it takes significant amount of time to save and load figures.
Here's a tip for shrinking your scene files.
If you've done any work with DAZ Studio, you'll notice that the .duf files it now produces are super-small. They also load and save very fast. That's because, instead of embedding the figures, they reference the figures at their locations in your library.
By contrast, if you create a scene and pose a figure in Carrara, the resulting scene files are gigantic (and 375MB is not even unusually large).
But -- and I think this isn't commonly known -- if you pose a Genesis figure in DAZ Studio, save it as a .duf file, and then open it in Carrara, Carrara will use a .duf-like strategy when it saves the file. In other words, it will save a file that contains references to the figures in your library, rather than complete object data. Files will be smaller, and saves and loads will be much faster. You can even re-pose the figure within Carrara, and your saved files will stay small. (Usually; there are seemingly some things that you can do that may cause Carrara to change saving strategies, at which point file bloat sets in again).
The catch, of course, with both DAZ Studio and Carrara, is that if the structure of your library changes and the software can't find the components, your scene file is basically broken. You almost certainly won't be able to reload it unless you reconstruct the library and put everything back exactly the way it was (and possibly not even then).
The other thing that you can do, as people have said, is to specify that texture maps should be saved externally. Again, instead of including the texture maps within your Carrara file, it simply saves the paths to the map on your filesystem, reducing file sizes and speeding up saves. The catch is similar: if those texture maps get moved, Carrara will prompt you to find them (which can be an agonizing process, as it makes you hunt for every last map for every last bit of a model, with no way to cancel out of it). If it can't find them, your figures will all turn gray.
One thing you can do is to save textures externally while you're working on a scene, and then save a final version with all textures stored internally. That way you're insured against the day that Murphy eats your library folders. As far as I know, however, there's no equivalent way to suggest that all the figure data should be included with the final file. It would be nice to be able to 'bake' a final version that included absolutely everything you needed to open and re-render the scene, even if Martians have subsequently come along and scattered all your carefully-organized content folders to the winds. But I don't know if this is possible.
You could use the Save As command, and then you'll get the different save options, including the Save Internally option.
One other thing that may help to speed up loading the scene, is to make sure you don't use compression when saving the scene initially. What helps with saving and then closing a scene is to not save a scene with the preview option enabled.
I will point out again, that the Save Locally option does not save any image maps you use within the file, but rather references them. If you break the file path, Carrara will ask you to find them the next time you open the scene. Geometry is saved within the scene no matter what options you use to save your scene, If you have a lot of high poly models, that's a lot of data that needs to be saved in the scene, and that needs to be read when opening a scene. Procedural shaders are also saved within the scene file with all options.
The Save Externally option will cause Carrara to save all the files in your scene to a location you specify. You will be asked to name each and every image map. If you're using premade content, this can take a l-o-o-n-g time to do. It is really best used if you're creating your own object or figure and want the maps you create saved to a specific location.
Also, going back to OPs original post from last year, I had just read recently, that turning of Texture Spooling in Carrara's preferences can help Carrara run more efficiently, particularly in multi-threaded rendering.
Here's a tip for shrinking your scene files.
If you've done any work with DAZ Studio, you'll notice that the .duf files it now produces are super-small. They also load and save very fast. That's because, instead of embedding the figures, they reference the figures at their locations in your library.
By contrast, if you create a scene and pose a figure in Carrara, the resulting scene files are gigantic (and 375MB is not even unusually large).
But -- and I think this isn't commonly known -- if you pose a Genesis figure in DAZ Studio, save it as a .duf file, and then open it in Carrara, Carrara will use a .duf-like strategy when it saves the file. In other words, it will save a file that contains references to the figures in your library, rather than complete object data. Files will be smaller, and saves and loads will be much faster. You can even re-pose the figure within Carrara, and your saved files will stay small. (Usually; there are seemingly some things that you can do that may cause Carrara to change saving strategies, at which point file bloat sets in again).
The catch, of course, with both DAZ Studio and Carrara, is that if the structure of your library changes and the software can't find the components, your scene file is basically broken. You almost certainly won't be able to reload it unless you reconstruct the library and put everything back exactly the way it was (and possibly not even then).
The other thing that you can do, as people have said, is to specify that texture maps should be saved externally. Again, instead of including the texture maps within your Carrara file, it simply saves the paths to the map on your filesystem, reducing file sizes and speeding up saves. The catch is similar: if those texture maps get moved, Carrara will prompt you to find them (which can be an agonizing process, as it makes you hunt for every last map for every last bit of a model, with no way to cancel out of it). If it can't find them, your figures will all turn gray.
One thing you can do is to save textures externally while you're working on a scene, and then save a final version with all textures stored internally. That way you're insured against the day that Murphy eats your library folders. As far as I know, however, there's no equivalent way to suggest that all the figure data should be included with the final file. It would be nice to be able to 'bake' a final version that included absolutely everything you needed to open and re-render the scene, even if Martians have subsequently come along and scattered all your carefully-organized content folders to the winds. But I don't know if this is possible.
still same, the projecting morphs takes a lot of times. I found opening carrara files are much faster, it takes roughly 5 to 8 seconds.
but saving carrara files takes 1 to 2 mints.
Good to know. So, what would your recommendation be for the amount allocated to texture spooling based on available RAM? For instance, if I had a 64 bit system with 8GB of RAM, do you think it would be wise to allocate some to texture spooling?
good question evil , thanks for asking
I have , I think, 32 gig, would be interested in an answer on that as well ;)
The reserved memory of Carrara's texture spooling only goes to 2.08Gb. So with an 8Gb system I'm guessing it would only slow things down by unnecessary HDD accesses. However, on my 8Gb AMD system and testing, Carrara seems to ignore any texture spooling settings. This option also doesn't affect my CPU usage as some have reported. It could be due to how AMD processors use system ram compared to Intel maybe(edit:I'm using C8.1 Pro 64 bit).