Strip / partial rendering

[miacreed]

Hi all, hope everyone is well,

I'm writing because I'm trying to render a still image for a client. I have a pretty decent workstation (Ryzen 9 / 64GB RAM), I normally never have issues rendering still images. However, this scene is very densely populated with polygon heavy elements. I'm using CoronaProxies in the scene (to the point where I can barely tell what is in the scene), the output resolution is also not too big (it's about 2000 x 1000, any less would be too low quality), but STILL the scene is using up all of my RAM and I've been having to render this scene via a render farm. This isn't ideal for me, and I was wondering if there is a method where I could split the image into separate segments or strips that I could stitch together later in Photoshop or some other program. I've never done this before because very few scenes obliterate my RAM the way this one seems to.

Is this possible? If so, can anyone quickly run through the steps to do it or recommend a tutorial?

Thanks in advance,
Mia

[davemahi]

I have done this before for a print job with a huge reolution on Garage Farm, they support strip rendering. Im not sure about doing it on your box though sorry. It sounds like your scene may be the issue. We have sent huge images with many of Forest pack scatters, so not sure why your's is having an issue.
Sorry I could not be of more help, but Garage Farm has helped me for sure on problems like this.

Cheers, and good luck.

[miacreed]

Hi!
Yes the scene is fully the issue but unfortunately I can't simplify it any more than I already have. I'm aware Garage Farm supports strip rendering but I'm wondering if there's anyway of doing that myself.

[hurrycat]

I'm not aware of any option to render the image into strips.

The ideal, fastest way would be to add 64gb more ram for a total of 128gb. If you have run out of ram slots on your motherboard you would have to trade your 64gb for 128gb sticks, which may not be something you want to do at the moment. 128gb is fairly common in Corona, especially if you want to populate bigger scenes.

Other than that, you can take a look at the Ram usage breakdown to see which geometries or textures are the heaviest. Try to not go above 4K for textures (you rarely need it). Try to troubleshoot your scene using IR (see which geometries take longer to load).

You can also try enabling the "Conserve memory" option under Render Setup / Performance, but I have had trouble with it in the past.

Hope it helps!

[Tom]

Hi,

Interesting topic.
I would recommend first to double-check if you can optimize your scene further. This tutorial may help you:
https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4528246355985-I-am-getting-a-sudden-rise-in-RAM-usage-

Another one about displacement maps optimization:
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,9728.0.html

I ran into a similar issue in the past, although my system has 128GB of RAM. It was mainly due to the huge number of render elements, as the scene was populated with so many lights and the lightmix was getting heavy, so better checking this point as well.

Lastly, back in the days, I remember I used the Blowup render option to overcome such difficulties. Did you try it? It's becoming more and more useless these days because of the high amount of RAM you tipically find in current systems, but there's no reason why it wouldn't work

Try it and please let us know how you go: https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Rendering-High-Resolution-Images.html

Hope it helps