Out of memory

[hain3d]

I've rendered a woman head scence with SSS shader and color/ bump mapping(~25897tris) with hair with MR in Maya, but it can't finished and shows:
.........
MEM 0.9 info : allocation of 173475740 bytes failed: flushing
MEM 0.9 info : try '-memory 149' for future runs
mental ray: out of memory
MEM 0.9 fatal 031008: can't allocate 173475740 bytes.
MEM 0.9 fatal 031008: can't allocate 173475740 bytes.

MyPC is P4 2.02 GHz with 1GB of RAM.
Please advice me how to avoid that error? And about information to avoid out of memory? The only information I've known is TRIX R 4 KIDS Vol_ 2-Memory optimization guideline.

Thank you very much.

[CTZn]

Basically try to reduce the Memory Limit under Render Globals/Memory and Performance, there are lots of more advanced tricks (I don't remember) but this one is a basis. It will flush data more often and in a smaller chunks fashion.

[Ultrasonic]

What have u set in memory and performance for your scene...try setting max memory to 0 or something like 2000...if it still doesn't render, use MR-Standalone with Swap_limit and swap_dir flag set..

edit: you are using hair? do u raytrace the shadows? maybe that's a problem...try using shadowmaps!

[hain3d]

@ ultrasonic:
I've set max memory to 800, because I have 1G of Ram.
I use spotlights and HDRI, spotlights with shadowmaps. But I think I have to change it to raytrace shadows, because shadow maps eat alot of RAM.

[Kameleon]

Hi there. I dont use Maya but I had the same problem in Max and I solved it by lowering the Max Memory (in your case I would go for the 512 Max Memory) and then I changed the bucket size to 16 (Default in Max is 48) what enables Mr to flush things out of memory more often... Hope this helps. Cya.

[sixbysixx]

There is an interesting thread on CGtalk on this:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=450612&highlight=mental+ray+memory+auto

I'm on Maya 8.5 OSX Intel MacPro with 9GB of RAM.
I know at the moment I can't use all this memory for rendering.

I added the memoryMode Attribute, set it to 4, Memory Auto on, Memory Zone to 20 and am still getting out of memory errors. Do I need to set memory zone to 0?
I thought when memoryMode is on 4, then memoryZone doesn't have any influence anymore...

Has anybody here played a bit more with memoryMode, memoryZone and Auto Memory?

I don't really want to reduce the bsp depth - my renders are slow enough as they are.

There must be a way with all these new parameters to let mentalray handle the available memory smartly enough in order to not run out of memory - or? maybe I'm just being too oprimistic :confused: