I’m using blender on OSX. What happens is the renderer climbs to about 1.5 gb or ram and crashes. I have 2 gig in by system. Can anyone make any recomendations?
Switch to Linux.
I jest. 
Ok, what does your crash log say (click report when it crashes - post the thread 0 crash)? Also, is your scene pretty huge or should it just not be using that much Ram?
Does it start to render any part of the scene and if it does, is it crashing consistently at the same part?
Have you tried to render in yafray to see if it crashes there too?
have you set any memory on the hard disk that it can use to write to? I had this problem on a powerbook but this helped.
to answer OSX rules, what happens is it starts to prepare the scene data and then it crashes. Nothing seems to render at all.
To answer the second question, I have no idea even how to do that.
this is what the crash report said
Date/Time: 2007-06-20 17:11:26.670 -0400
OS Version: 10.4.9 (Build 8P2137)
Report Version: 4
Command: blender
Path: /Applications/blender 2.44/Blender 2.44.app/Contents/MacOS/blender
Parent: WindowServer [63]
Version: 2.44 (2.44, 2007-May-13, Blender Foundation)
PID: 471
Thread: Unknown
Link (dyld) error:
image not found
Model: MacBookPro2,1, BootROM MBP21.00A5.B01, 2 processors, Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.33 GHz, 2 GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon X1600, ATY,RadeonX1600, PCIe, 256 MB
Memory Module: BANK 0/DIMM0, 1 GB, DDR2 SDRAM, 667 MHz
Memory Module: BANK 1/DIMM1, 1 GB, DDR2 SDRAM, 667 MHz
AirPort: AirPort Extreme, 1.0.47
Bluetooth: Version 1.7.14f14, 2 service, 0 devices, 1 incoming serial ports
Network Service: AirPort, AirPort, en1
Serial ATA Device: Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00, 149.05 GB
Parallel ATA Device: MATSHITADVD-R UJ-85J
USB Device: Built-in iSight, Micron, Up to 480 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: External HDD, Western Digital, Up to 480 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Hub, Up to 480 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse, Logitech, Up to 1.5 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: IR Receiver, Apple Computer, Inc., Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad, Apple Computer, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Bluetooth HCI, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA
Is this using the blender internal renderer or the yafray renderer? If it’s yafray, it needs to be installed manually. It still shouldn’t crash of course.
If it’s not yafray, try looking at your console, which is in /Applications/Utilities/Console and see what messages you get from the time you launch Blender until the time it crashes.
I’m using blender internal. This is what it said
blender(549) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=8421376) failed (error code=3)
blender(549) malloc: *** error: can’t allocate region
blender(549) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
Calloc returns nill: len=14336 in findOrAddVert, total 1680504232
Jun 20 18:49:50 conor-maccallan-finkelmans-powerbook-g4-17 crashdump[557]: blender crashed
Jun 20 18:49:50 conor-maccallan-finkelmans-powerbook-g4-17 crashdump[557]: crash report written to: /Users/conormaccallanfinkelman/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/blender.crash.log
What I would do first of all is run disk utility to repair your drive and see if it comes up with anything.
If you aren’t particularly comfortable with the command-line, you can boot from the system disk and run Disk Utility from there and do a repair disk on your system drive.
If you are comfortable with the command-line, an easier way is to boot holding command-s. This takes you to the command line (the fans will likely come on). Type in:
fsck -f
and hit return
Wait for it to complete and when it does, type:
reboot
and hit return.
If this doesn’t sort anything and you are rendering a large scene (possibly you have subdivision levels up high), you maybe need to talk to one of the developers because they had similar issues when rendering around the 1.5GB mark:
http://orange.blender.org/blog/stupid-memory-problems
That’s what you picked for your ‘short’ name?
I think it’s a “stupid memory problem”.
What would you recomend to aleviate this problem. Breaking it down into separate passes? Or do you think that I should try to install the mmap utility?
I’m sure they changed Blender to use mmap by default, which is why you would be best speaking to one of the devs over at blender.org as the crash shouldn’t happen. Post the crash logs too or link to this thread.
In the mean time, rendering in layers should help. Try to separate objects with the largest amounts of geometry. So say you had a backdrop with 1 million verts but characters of 20000 verts each, render the backdrop in layer 1 and then the characters in layer 2. Then composite the two together.
I can’t remember exactly but I think that 1 million verts equates to about 512MB Ram. So you can probably get away with 2 million per layer. Out of interest, how many vertices are in your entire scene and what resolution are your textures? Also what is the output resolution? Maybe just rendering in more x and y parts would help.