Bryce 7.1 and "Out of Memory"
tnpir4002_8c3dde19be
Posts: 11
I asked this in another forum and it was suggested I repost it in the Bryce forum, so here goes:
I’m working on a system with plenty of RAM (Windows XP Pro, 3GM RAM), and I’ve made sure Bryce 7.1 is LAA-enabled (that utility that got posted a looong time ago), and yet, when saving some large scenes, I still get that damned “Out of memory!” error. The weird thing is that it does the same thing every time—when saving, it gets to 99%, then that error pops up.
Seems to me if it can get to 99% there shouldn’t be anything stopping it from getting to 100%. Anybody else run up against this and know how to fix it?
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I suspect the key to your problem is large scenes. That and even though you're using LAA you're still not giving Bryce all it can use. I say that because LAA can allow Bryce to use up to either 3.4 or 3.6 GB I'm not sure because I've heard both. Either way though that's more then all the memory you have. So between that and the fact that some of that also goes to running your OS and any other things you might have running (anti virus, IM, media player, etc.), Bryce is still not getting all it can to work with.
Another thing to consider is this, is that a prebuilt machine like a Dell or HP or some brand of laptop? I ask because 3GB is an odd configuration for custom built machines but is common in prebuilt machines that use onboard video. In those cases if say your video card is supposed to be 1GB then that one GB is coming from your 3GB of system memory leaving 2 for everything else. So while you think you've got more then enough you don't You really need at least 4GB preferably 8 and an OS that can recognize that much memory.
Now intially I said your problem may just be large scenes just because it gets to 99% doesn't mean there is some simple trick that will get you to 100% I understand your reasoning but it doesn't always correlate that way. Sometimes a scene is too big because it just has too many objects and you really are out of memory. In that case all you can do is remove things until it does work. Sometimes though a scene is too large because of the textures used. Like for example, if you are importing one of the Elite Characters for V4 or M4 to populate the scene, their textures can be quite large in resolution like 4000x4000. A texture that size takes up alot of room and is only needed for extreme close up where you want to be able to count the pores in the character's skin (not literally just figuratively). Otherwise that texture could be shrunk down to a more standard resolution like 1280 x1280 and everything will still look fine and you'll use less memory. Of course you could also opt to use a lower resolution figure like say V3 Reduce Resolution or any of the several lorez figures offered at Daz by Predatron.
Now there is one thing that can eat into your memory enough to cause problems and that is the undo buffer, which I believe can cover up to 20 changes made. So if that's what's holding you back then the thing to do is save you scene just before rendering, close bryce down completely, restart Bryce and then reload the scene and then do whatever you were trying to do when you got the out of memory error. You unfortunately have to close Bryce to clean out the buffer but doing it that way should free up some memory if you made alot of adjustments to your scene prior to getting the intial error.
There is also a trick for the too many objects problem and that is to render the scene in layers and then combine those layers in like photoshop for example. Like one layer would be your background, another would be whatever figures or the main objects in your scene are and then another might be any additional props to complete the scene. That way Bryce never has to deal with the whole scene.
At this point though if it's possible your best bet would be to get more memory and an OS that can make use of it. Like if you like XP so much there is an XP 64 although XP is going to fade into history soon so you really should consider upgrading to Windows 7.
It's an old Dell tower, actually. I've got several 64-bit machines I'm working with, so I'm able to farm out the work to those machines and make up the difference. It's just frustrating!...I've got some 64-bit towers that came with Windows Vista, 8GB of RAM, I'm looking into transferring operations to one of them instead.
As for XP...it's far from about to "fade into history," believe me. There are too many people who won't upgrade past it after the Vista debacle, and plenty of others that are like me and can't because some key programs won't run on anything after XP.
I dual-boot between XP and Windows 7 now so I get the benefits of both, but still...
@Brandon - if you have the LAA tool, you may also have the Process Monitor that is available for free on the same webpage. Start it, then start Bryce. Select Bryce in the drop down of the Monitor. You can see what memory Bryce only uses. When you hit the save button, you'll notice that more memory is used. This is because the scene file is compressed and this is (partly or all?) done in memory before it is written to disk. For a scene you can successfully save, you will notice that once the file is written, you get the memory back.
The same is true when you load a scene. The compressed file is loaded into memory and then unpacked. When done, the file is dumped from memory. Your machine might just miss a few hundred kilos. Perhaps there are some services running you may stop and clear in the task manager. However, you will have trouble loading it again.
@Horo: I think maybe when we develop Bryce 8, we should make this part work better!...I've seen Bryce get up to 1.2GB of memory usage, I've enabled LAA and set paging file size to 6.5GB on two separate drives--in theory that should alleviate this problem but it still happens.
But Bryce doesn't page. It is all in memory, nothing can bleed over to the disk. This was Mac philosophy at the time and we inherited it. Bryce being still a 32 bit application with the 2GB (or 3.5 GB) memory limit is bad enough but that it doesn't use virtual memory on a HD is worse. Of course, using the HD as virtual memory makes things really slow, but it would at least work.
That explains why adjusting the paging file size isn't helping. That, then, DEFINITELY seems like something we need to add to Bryce 8 x86 if we ever make one.
That goes without saying. Particularly if we want to take advantage of the Genesis content from Studio. It goes hard on the memory. It ought to be in DAZ 3D's interest to give Bryce a better memory management.
Agreed...but you saw what the Bryce 7 development cycle was like, DAZ skipped over a lot of things that were in their interest, and the end product suffered as a result (the AML still doesn't really work that well, and I discovered a pretty serious bug with the material editor)...but that's a discussion for another time I think.
Yeah, there are already a couple of items on my growing list if we ever get there.
Well by that I meant it will no longer be supported. I'm sure there will be some that will never give up on XP but I doubt the public will get MS to postpone discontinuing support for another couple of years like they did when Vista failed.
Anyway to your situation the first step I would take would be to try it running from a machine able to access 4 or more GB's of ram. If it's still happening then we need to examine what exactly it is you're doing (what's in the scene, etc.) There are things that Bryce has problems with but usually they just cause a crash with no out of memory issue. More likely you'll have to try some of the improvisions I suggested.
For what it's worth I too got alot of out of memory issue before I had 4 or more GB and was running on XP then I went to XP 64 and used LAA and the out of memory issues went away except scenes where I knew it was heavily loaded. What really needs to happen since 3D models and their textures are growing ever larger in the resources they need, is for a 64 bit version of Bryce that can utilize as much memory as today's computers can handle. Realistically that is probably more then a year away though.
I've heard about this LAA - what is it exactly?
I've guessed it's some kind of utility to assist with Bridging Memory but know nothing more.
If it is that useful - please could someone tell me how to obtain and apply it.
Thanks
Terry
@tdrd: It's a utility that lefts Bryce access memory greater than it's limited 2 GB of memory use. You can get the Large Address Aware utility here, http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112556 . I don't know all the specifics of the utility other than it allows Bryce to access memory over 2 GB. Unless your computer has over 2 GB the utility isn't of any benefit.
You started a thread on Out of Memory, that's now on page two of this discussion area, where Mark talks more about this. It's also where I got the link listed above.
@tdrd - if you download the LAA tool, download also the Process Monitor on the same page (free). It shows you the memory usage of a selected application. If your computer sports at least 4 GB of memory, Bryce can use up to around 3.4 GB instead of only 2 GB.
I've just had this out memory error I can't see how this can happen as i have 16gb of ram can any one explain how this happens
thanks
It may be happening because Bryce can only address 2gb of your available ram and that limit has been exceeded or, if you are using LAA tool already, it make be because it has exceeded the 3.4gb limit as mentioned in the post above. Either way, a single instance of Bryce cannot do justice to your 16gb of ram, because of the limitations of the software and the OS it is running under.
I deal with this by saving often and then clocing an rebooting Bryce from time to time, to clear the undo stack.
Also happens sometimes if you are using too many Hi res imported textures, You have to remember that Brcye does not use compressed textures, but decompresses them to the same kb size as a tiff would be.
Hi - For those with memory issues and Bryce. You have to remember that Bryce is sharing memory with all the other apps and services running in the background. So a 3 gig stick of RAM memory is not going to go far.
Just an added tip to using the LAA program ( I have 16 gigs of RAM in my system but CPU still takes a beating at times when Bryce running a very large render setup )
Before I use Bryce - I always run a memory optimizer to flush out the crap sitting in RAM and the CPU. ( I personally use Glary utilities for this and as soon as I open up Bryce I then run the LAA program ) Glary by the way has a free version which limits some utilities, but I think the memory optimizer is still usable in free version ) You can also find free programs like this at http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/ where I have gotten quite a few programs over the years.
Have a great day!
Bruce
I recorded a 17 minute video on the subject. David is so kind to host it on his YouTube channel: Bryce Memory Shortage - and what you can do about it - by Horo Wernli. Perhaps it helps.
I also tend to get a lot more paranoid about saving, and try to do some general cleanup maintenance when I start to get to that point. I'm working on a scene right now where I started to hit the out of memory error. I tried to make a few minor edits to two terrains and deleting and moving one or two objects, which worked, but after doing a spot render it failed to save. After having it happen twice in a row, I finally just started doing each thing one at a time or close with a save in between each (and a backup copy in case the save didn't reload correctly). I deleted three objects, saved, exited and restarted, edited one terrain, saved, exited and restarted, edited the other terrain, saved, exited and restarted, etc. It got me past that point. I then started hunting through the scene for potential cleanup areas, and was able to find and delete a few instanced objects that were out of view along with several pieces of several different objects that were simply invisible due to being behind other things or on portions of objects extending off or facing away from the camera and their shadows/reflections weren't visible or critical. I also replaced a few complex curved objects with four pyramids that served the same function, and actually gave a better appearance despite being simpler. I'm not quite done with the scene, but even though I was able to add a few more things without problems, I'm doing it just a tiny bit at a time, and I'm not wasting time spot rendering for hours until I've verified that I can save and reload the scene first.
Great video, Horo...have added it to my Favourites Folder (always good to have somethng like this on hand).
Have to admit, I haven't experienced many crashes with Bryce when using static or animation renders. However, that said, I do tend to accept the normal (Regular AA) setting rather than higher (Premium AA) one for static, while for animation, it would simply be ridiculous to use Premium.
I do animation more than static renders, but the problem with the former is that you don't want to let them render for too long (minimum around three hours in saved increments) as any animation over that time tends to a possible crash. Not always, mind, but have lost several long animations when ignoring the above.
Jay
I gave it a like.
@GeroblueJim - thank you. Good to know that it was of some help.
You're welcome.
I wanted to thank LordHardDriven for his suggestion to use Large Address Aware. I have a Dell Optiplex 745 running windows 7 64bit with a 3.4 ghz processor, 5 gigs of ram, and a 2 gig video card. I'm careful to keep lots of hard drive space available on my system drive, i increased the pagefile size, and defrag before each time i use bryce, but nothing seemed to help. my renders seemed to be stuck in the stone age along with my last machine, which was considerably more pathetic. i was already putting daz studio figures into the scene one at a time, doing several renders, and layering together in photoshop many years ago, so that suggestion didn't help. i looked into the instancing tool. that didn't help much either. i looked into converting my figures into meshes, simplifying them, and then smoothing them. the thing that has me the most grateful is that i was perilously close to investing tons of money into larger ram chips for my computer that i really can not afford, and it would not have done me any good at all.
to say this utility helped would be a massive understatement. it nearly doubled the number of objects i can put into a scene. also, bryce loads faster, responds faster, and makes it a lot less quirky to move things around. its not much short of a miracle for me. (the renders still take forever, looking into what i can do about that without sacrificing quality.)
sadly, this new understanding of bryce's limitations means i will always have to struggle and even cheat a little to some extent to make elaborate scenes, so pouring money into my hardware isn't going to be much help as far as my ram chips go, but i did need to understand this, because i can't afford 3D Studio Max, which is what i trained on in college. i've invested so much time and effort getting to know bryce, and i am loathe to give it up.
I am not the most technically minded person in the world, so it took me a bit to find where the utility actually was. for anyone reading this post, incase it hasn't already been made clear, you can find a really easy GUI utility here that is amazing.
http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php
most people use it for 32 bit video games, but i am here to say it works like a charm with bryce!
to DAZ, i'm certainly not tech savvy enough to know what is involved, but if you guys could do something about increasing the amount of ram that bryce is capable of dealing with, that would be fantastic. i gather from the posts that i have read that you aren't too serious about making a version 8, and that a 64bit version of bryce is not feasible, but many older guys like me become set in our ways, and don't want to have to start over from scratch with carrara. my wife worked with doctors converting from paper records to paperless, and the common response she got was "i'm two years away from retirement, i'm not going through that learning process." i myself resisted getting a cell phone for years because i didn't want to deal with the hassle. there have to be a lot more dinosaurs like me hanging on to the past with bryce, and i would bet that you've drawn in a few more with the twenty dollar price tag.
anyway, thanks to all for the stuff i learned from this post, especially LordHardDriven! :cheese:
Thanks for the link, it worked like a charm for my Bryce out of memory error (64bit Haswell w/16gb ram)!
As far as updating Bryce goes, it would be nice since I have NO plans to ever stop using it. "From my cold dead hands" comes to mind. :smirk:
Dave
Bryce user since 1997 (and I have the boxes to prove it).
I am going to point out that there are many hard coded memory limits in Bryce. Some of them had their limits raised in Bryce 6, and a few more in Bryce 7, but they are still there. Using the LAA tool (hack) is not recommended by the people that wrote that tool on programs with such limitations. Attempting to force LAA when there are hard coded memory limits in software can make a program less stable.
With a program that is not Large Address Aware, like Bryce, there is a limit of 2GB for addressable RAM, this limit is imposed by the OS.
Note that with a program that is designed to be Large Address Aware (With the flag set and the OS set to allow it) the limit is 3GB on a 32 bit system and 4GB on a 64 bit system (64 bit is automatically set to allow it). That is how much memory the software can address, and virtual ram, or the amount of Ram above that number can not change that. While you can do things like spool off texture files, that isn't the same
Yes you can force the flag with Bryce, but that does make it less stable and we can not support that.
Response quoted below so we know who and what i am responding to.
First, duly noted that this may cause the program to be unstable, and i would guess that you know more about this subject than i do, just a guess though.
You sound as if Bryce was ever anywhere near stable on a PC to begin with. I can not begin to count the number of times bryce crashed on me when i was performing a perfectly legitimate operation. has to be in the thousands at least, if not the tens of thousands. sometimes bryce even seizes control of my operating system, forcing me to cold boot. i learned long ago to save frequently and incrementally. i just can not begin to express the extra number of objects i can place in the document at the same time. rendering over and over again with a few objects at a time only gets you so far, and causes problems with missing shadows and such. I still pull such stunts, even after using large address aware, but the images i can now create are so much more robust. LAA does provide a backup executable if you decide this isn't for you, so it doesn't do permanent damage in any case. (not that i have seen a single problem with it yet in any case ever)
Lots of changes produce unpredictable results, and when experimenting, there is always a risk. Its not likely that you are going to talk me into ceasing this practice, when all i have gotten out of it is incredible renders, and no problems as of yet. (keeping my fingers crossed mind you...) come to think of it, bryce has not crashed on me even one time since i started using large address aware on it. food for thought...
Thanks for the warning though. duly noted, but gonna do it anyway, LOL
@DAZ_Spooky - though I haven't experienced that much of Bryce crashes like kar2nz137, I'm using Bryce daily from around 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. with the LAA flag set and experience a crash about all 3 months. I reset the flag when I test products as a PA before I submit them to PASS. Microsoft has built in this flag and also recommends to use it, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb613473(v=vs.85).aspx. Hard memory limits (as for arrays and such) prohibit (or ought to) that any software trespasses into memory used for other tasks. Of course, we all must be aware that we use it at our own risk. Honestly, Bruce, we couldn't use many DAZ 3D products in Bryce without the flag set. 2 GB are just not enough.
That article is how to set the OS for allowing the OS to authorize a program that is Large Address Aware to use more than 2GB address space that the OS generally allows, not needed for 64 bit OS. To use it the program has to be Large Address Aware, which Bryce is not, as it doesn't meet the standards to be LAA.
That LAA flag is set at compile time for the program, if the program is actually Large Address Aware, by the author of the program, for example Bryce.
All I am saying is forcing the LAA flag for a program that isn't written to the LAA Standards may cause things to be unstable. Further you mention in your video that Bryce, on your 64 bit system, never gets above 3.4 GB of RAM used instead of hte full 4GB that it should be able to use. This is because, even though you told your computer that Bryce is LAA, Bryce is not LAA. A program being LAA is more than just setting a flag.
and i agree with this point entirely. much as i appreciate the well intended warning, bryce really is lacking in the power department. the interface is awesome. the learning curve is low. the renders are incredible. however, it causes my computer to cough up a lung and die if i ever expect it to do anything ambitious.
So i don't "recommend" anything, just simply state how well applying this information has worked out for me. Do so at your own risk. it works fine for me, but might do all sorts of things i am not qualified to predict on someone else's machine. if you are happy doing those old wimpy renders without much in them, by all means keep on keepin on. in the meantime, get on Daz's case about a 64 bit version, which is years overdue, and from what i have heard, no plan is in place for.
happy rendering all...