My scene too complex for GPU

Support Lighting and Rendering
#1

Um, I have pretty complex scene, or at least I think so, 'cause Cycles GPU give up rendering it after building BVH. These is what it says in the render port: Men “2045.38M Peak 2045.38M”
It can be rendered in CPU, but you know… another couple of days render time :spin::spin::spin::spin::spin:
I’ve read that you can split up a scene using seperate layers and so render it out, but my scene only contains one character model so that won’t work here.
I also tried packing my textures with no luck.

Is there anything I can do to render this out with my GPU?

Thanks!

#2

You can lower the poly count, or use smaller textures. In the scene tab, at the bottom there’s a area called simplify, check the checkbox and you can specify max subsurf levels and also override children particle numbers, try lowering max subsurf to 1 or 2, and children to .5 or so, see if you can squeeze it into the GPU.

#3

Just curious. How much memory does your graphics card have?

#4

And what size are you trying to render your image to? That’s another thing that can affect the size of the needed memory capacity.

#5

I realised that the problem come down to two things: too many children particles and my enormous texture stacking. I lowered the amount of children particles and it did render!!! Buuuut character model rendered black - probably due to my big texture stacking. Tried to bake the textures but I just get the error message “circular dependency” :frowning:
I’ve never really baked textures before, so I don’t know how to solve this… I can’t find the circular dependency Blender tells me should be there. :spin:

Can you take a look at it?
It’s here in my google drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8I7vdW7EC1iZWF6cEpTdVU2bG8/view?usp=sharing

The model is “Varg” and the material is the one with the same name. As you can see I have some stacking of textures but can’t figure out how to bake them.

Thanks!

#6

Most of your maps are 4096x4096 which is going to get huge quick. I’d resize them all to 2048x2048, except for the normal which I think you’re not supposed to change the resolution later. On the fur have the segments lowered to 2, which will help with the particle memory.

#7

And would it help if I baked the textures to one?

#8

And my journey took an unexpected ending: when I at last had baked my textures I FINALLY SUCCEDED TO RENDER IT IN MY GPU!!! Buuuuuuuuuut it turned out that the GPU render subsurface scattering SLOWER than the CPU O.O
Well, not much to do about it… :spin:
Thanks for all :smiley:

#9

You also should probably start breaking-down the shots and doing a lot more work in the compositor.

Give up, early, on the idea that a scene has to pop-out of one render, fully-formed, like Venus popping out of a big clam-shell. It doesn’t have to and it usually doesn’t.

Also give some serious thought to whether you want to or need to use Cycles for everything. It’s a good renderer for nice, soft, bouncy lighting but it can sometimes take a long and inexact way to get there. You have more than one renderer at your disposal, just considering what’s built in, and a great compositor. Compositing will save your ass-terisk… :yes:

#10

Thanks, that’s actually what I choosed to do in the end: I seperated my character model and its fur in two seperate layers and they render very nicely. These render layerss truly are life savers when it comes to rendering…

#11

Yeah, embrace that idea. Stuff like: if the camera’s not moving, you need one background frame. Freely combine BI with Cycles to use the best of both. Turn off shadows, then use shadow-only spots to create shadows where you want them. Separate everything into individual layers so that you can “mix-down” the final shot like they mix-down a song in a recording studio. Put detail in close-up shot #1 and they’ll “see it” in farther-away shot #2. Cut-together all the shots first, using OpenGL, then render exactly what you need. Stuff like that. You wind up planning a lot more in advance, but the shoot takes dramatically less time … and I think the results overall just look better.