I have a simple scene that crashes while rendering with Blender 2.49b.
The blend file is 492 KB.
According to the top-right of the Blender application window, the scene has 1415 vertices and 1088 faces (Ve:1415 | Fa:1088 | Ob:4-1).
When I render, the top-left of the Blender Render window states that the scene has 17425 vertices and 16384 faces (Fra:1 Ve:17425 Fa:16384 La:1).
When the render begins, it does an SSS preprocessing pass. Immediately after the SSS preprocessing pass and right before the render begins, Blender crashes.
The Blender console throws the following error:
“Calloc returns nill: len=383999968 in ScatterPoints, total 499925912”
This error seems to be related to the Blender application running out of memory, but I can’t understand why it would be running out of memory since the scene is so simple.
I have found two ways to render successfully, but neither solution is acceptable:
If I turn off SSS, then the render will succeed. But the scene looks much better with SSS.
If I reduce the size of the render from 4000x3000 to 3000x2250 (75%), then the render will succeed. But I need to render at a larger size.
Anyone have any ideas on how I can get this render to succeed (without moving to a 64-bit O/S)?
Info
WinXP (32-bit) Home Edition w/ SP3
Blender 2.49b
4 GB RAM (3.25 GB reported by WinXP)
I think the render size is the problem. You need RAM to store the image while rendering, and 4k is quite big. Yoe could try rendering the image in parts and putting them together afterwards. There is a script that does it for you, but I have heard it may be no longer working - I could be wrong, best to check it out for yourself:- http://www.macouno.com/2010/03/18/really-big-render/
An alternative is to split your scene into layers and render each layer separately, then composite the layers.
I would disagree that 4K is large. I have done 100s of renders at that size. It seems to be the combination of the size AND SSS that is causing the problem here. But I still can’t imagine how a simple scene would use up 2 GB of memory!
Thanks. I have downloaded and run the Python script on my scene by splitting it up to a 2x2 formation.
Unfortunately, in the areas where you join the split images together, there is some variation in lighting (which I can’t explain).
I was able to workaround this by executing the Python script in a 3x3 formation and then combining these renders with the first set of renders.