Chaos Corona Forum

Chaos Corona for Cinema 4D => [C4D] General Discussion => Topic started by: steverb on 2019-08-28, 17:19:17

Title: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: steverb on 2019-08-28, 17:19:17
I have a 20 second animation that uses a high resolution video for a texture. Every time I do a render it goes for about 150-200 frames and then stops due to insufficient RAM (See error message below). Often it's not just Cinema 4D that crashes but my entire machine locks up. I'm on a 2013 Mac Pro, 32BG RAM and r19. I realize I may be pushing my luck here, but are there any render settings I can adjust that would reduce the amount of RAM needed to render my scene? I have tried checking "Conserve memory (slower)" under Performance Settings but I still run out of RAM.

Thanks for any help.

===== Warning(10004) =====
System is running low on RAM. You may experience excessive parsing times and/or crashes. You will probably have to simplify the scene.

4 GB of physical RAM used by Cinema 4D
26.1 GB of virtualized* RAM used by Cinema 4D
32.8 GB of virtualized* RAM used by all running applications
32 GB of physical RAM installed on system
33 GB of virtualized* RAM provided by OS

* virtualized RAM means physical RAM + swap file on HDD/SSD

Corona RAM usage breakdown:
  197.8 MB beauty/multi-pass
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: TomG on 2019-08-28, 17:29:48
The best tips are all at https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000675854-system-is-running-low-on-ram-you-may-experience-excessive-parsing-times-and-or-crashes-you-will-pro

Also consider switching off other apps so that nothing else is running, and is it possible to downscale the video at all so it isn't high res? Unless it's filling the screen at the same video resolution, it wouldn't need to be full size.
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: steverb on 2019-08-28, 17:36:20
Thanks for the quick reply. I'll check out those tips and see what I can do. Thanks.
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: ficdogg on 2019-08-28, 20:07:57
Is your video plugged in as a video format(mp4 etc) or an image sequence?
An image sequence might work better because it won't need to load the entire video file for every frame.
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: steverb on 2019-08-28, 21:44:50
It's an MP4. I didn't realize you could do a texture with an image sequence. I'll have to give that a try.
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: steverb on 2019-08-28, 21:52:05
Well, that doesn't seem to work. I'm unable to load an image sequence. Is there a way to do that?
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: steverb on 2019-08-28, 21:55:27
I guess I take that back. I just needed to place all the images in a "tex" folder. They had been in another folder with another name. Thanks.
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: steverb on 2019-08-28, 21:57:51
Actually it seems the images just need to be in a folder right next to the .c4d file regardless of the name. Hope it works.
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: ficdogg on 2019-08-29, 00:44:11
I don't think that matters much, where they are. I usually just have them in a folder somewhere with nothing else in it. The main thing is to click on the texture in the material slot, then in the animation tab click on calculate so that it loads the whole sequence rather than just the first frame, then play with the range setting to get the timing right.
If you're using a regular c4d material, you can have the animation previewing in the viewport, if you're using a corona material, I don't think it will show in IR but it will render fine.
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: zbieraj on 2019-08-29, 11:16:29
If you have something in the scene that can be turned into proxy, do so. Proxy will dramatically reduce amount of RAM used.
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: romullus on 2019-08-29, 11:35:06
Proxy will dramatically reduce amount of RAM used.

That is not true. Proxy will only reduce scene file size and improve viewport navigation, but RAM usage will stay the same if not a little bit higher.
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: steverb on 2019-08-29, 15:45:52
Thanks for all the advice. It looks like using image sequences did the trick for me. I rendered 1047 frames overnight and had no problems.
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: zbieraj on 2019-08-30, 08:53:03

That is not true. Proxy will only reduce scene file size and improve viewport navigation, but RAM usage will stay the same if not a little bit higher.

Really? I have seen a drop in RAM usage when rendering through the proxies... I will be rendering something with them in next few days - I will look closely to the results, maybe I am really wrong...
Title: Re: Trying to reduce RAM usage
Post by: burnin on 2019-09-01, 16:58:48
That's because the open scene is lighter.
Render it via CLI to see real render consumption (keep C4D closed - don't open the scene)