topic Re: Managing CineRender RAM Usage in Modeling

Managing CineRender RAM Usage

Anonymous — Thu, 25 May 2023 14:57:15 GMT

Greetings fellow ArchiCAD users! I have a difficult question about using CineRender to export photo rendered fly-throughs in ArchiCAD 19.

Specifically, is there any possibility of creating a scratch disk to offload RAM usage during renders? I'm completely maxed out for RAM with 64gb of DDR3 1866 Mhz ECC registered memory and still run out of usable memory after rendering 12 frames (289 total frames) of this fly-through.

Admittedly the project I'm rendering is massive. It's about 1 square mile of detailed mesh terrain contours and one detailed structure the size of 3 football fields, 6 stories tall.

I have broken down the fly-through path into 25 different cameras at equidistant intervals and have attempted to output just the frames between two of those cameras with 12 frames in between. RAM usage after 12 frames of rendering is around 61gb and around 30+gb of RAM is "compressed memory" which doesn't uncompress after the render is completed. I'm forced to restart my computer to create another fly-through as CineRender's RAM usage remains even after one render is complete.

If anyone could give me some advice on working around this RAM limitation, it'd be greatly appreciated!

ArchiCAD 19 build 5005
Mac OS X 10.11.4
CPU: Intel Xeon E5 1650 v2
RAM: 64gb DDR3 1866 Mhz ECC registered
GPU: 2x AMD FirePro d500 6gb (3gbx2)
Storage: 1TB PCIe SSD

Re: Managing CineRender RAM Usage

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 12:17:29 GMT

Update: This seems to be a memory leak only occurring in ArchiCAD 19. I exported the project back to 18 build 6000 and the entire render is running smoothly, with memory usage resetting after each frame is exported. I sent a support ticket to Graphisoft detailing the process.

Re: Managing CineRender RAM Usage

Erwin Edel — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 13:41:49 GMT

I can confirm the memory leak, ran in to this problem with flythrough as well (somewhere last summer).

Both on windows 7 and on OSX.

It was very annoying, meant you had to 'babysit' the workstations all day, rendering only a few frames at a time, closing ArchiCAD entirely to clear up memory and then rendering the next few frames.

Best bet is to render to PNG for the frames and combine them all to one movie afterwards.

We have nowhere near the amount of RAM as you do (16 gb and 32 gb), but also a fairly sizeable building and sloping mesh.

To keep things reasonable, I tweaked the settings to the lowest acceptable quality, which meant it was rendering about a frame per 2-3 minutes.