Minimizing RAM usage, and large scenes..

[chrisis]

Hi everybody, and Keymaster thanks for the great render!

I'm currently using corona for a relatively small interior scene. Long story short PT+HD 4300x3000, internal resolution at 2 and a few elements and corona exceeded some 24 gb of ram.
 
I managed to get it to ~10 gb by removing a few elements I don't really need that much and setting internal resolution to 1 (what is internal resolution, btw and does it affect quality/performance?).

I'm really hoping however to use corona for large exterior scenes, with lots of masks, elements and quite a lot of vegetation. So what would be the right way to do that? Is there a way to make a material shiny, but not actually reflective and would something like that even help minimize ram? 

[racoonart]

Reducing internal res. to 1 is the right way to go. This setting means it's rendering in double resolution and resizing it down. It's helping to minimize aliasing on bright contrasty edges but it's really problematic for bigger resolution (so your 4300x3000 picture is actually a 8600x6000 px rendering internally, that's why it's eating up so much RAM). As far as I know, internal res. is something which will be removed anyways + there is an issue with alphas. So it's advisable to not use it in certain conditions.

[chrisis]

Thanks and thanks for clarifying what it is!

Working quite well now :) Any and all other tips for reducing Ram usage would be greatly appreciated! I can leave it to render for a while, not problem, but if corona reaches the system's max ram it actually seems to hang the system, even though there is a decently large page file.. I'd eventually like to pass some 500+ mil faces/ tris or so and resolutions of 6000px+ through corona.. so gotta be prepared :)

[Ondra]

yep, go internal res = 1, unless you have specific problems with light edges antialiasing. 1 will be default in A7 and the entire option will be completely removed later

[Stan_But]

yep, go internal res = 1, unless you have specific problems with light edges antialiasing. 1 will be default in A7 and the entire option will be completely removed later

did you found decision for problem with light edges AA without Int.res? sounds good ;)

[chrisis]

Set 1, got it.

Is it possible to not view what's going on in the frame buffer though? Would that save some ram? Or can I just turn off elements preview in the buffer, so corona just auto-saves them like it does.. but does not take up those 64 bytes per pixel during render.