Out of memory ? How to fix it ?

Support Lighting and Rendering
21

I used to swear by 2k PBR materials. Now, I prefer 512x512 materials because:

  1. In most cases, you can’t tell the difference, unless something is close to the camera.
  2. Eevee is so much faster at orbiting the viewport in real-time.
  3. As a bonus, low res textures cost less credits on textures.com.

Obviously, you’ll need higher resolution if you’re going for super high-res renders though, but 512 resolution is amazing otherwise.

22

In the computer-programming circles that I sometimes frequent, they have a saying affectionally known as "Tim Toady:"

TMTOWTDI: “There’s More Than One Way To Do It.™”

And there’s also “Alfred Hitchcock’s acting advice to Ingrid Bergman” …

"Ingrid, fake it!"

So, anytime you’ve got a scene in your mind’s eye, always think about what is the “fastest and least-expensive way” to produce … “good enough.” Pixar® might have become famous for lavishing on all kinds of details “that no one will ever actually see,” but, “you’re not Pixar.”

In the original theatrical release of Star Wars® Episode One, a crowd in a podracer scene was achieved using colored cotton swabs. Since the audience had already seen a shot using actors, no one noticed the substitution until a “Making Of” documentary pointed it out. (The shot has since been replaced.) Deadlines were tight and the shot would appear on-screen for only a few seconds.

Also – don’t build(!) anything that you will never see. When the cowboys rode through town in all those spaghetti Westerns that all of us still love, there never was anything “behind” those buildings. They were only facades. Interior shots were filmed back at the studio, on entirely separate sets. Don’t waste time on geometry that will always be “culled.” (This does require planning each shot in advance.)

2 Likes
23

What if I’m rendering with CPU and it crashes sayinh out of memory? I’m currently trying to render with GPU and will see what happens.

24

I don’t know if someone has mentioned it here, but one of the biggest memory eaters I know is the HDRI maps. If you illuminate your scene using an HDRI use a 1K version. You will not see a big difference in the global illumination unless you need crisp reflections.

25

Please be aware that this thread was started in 2013, and a lot has changed in Blender since then. It is therefore rather misleading to “resurrect” such an old thread because the admonitions and solutions that were effective then may no longer be relevant now.

Please start a new thread, possibly including a hyperlink to any older ones that you think might still be relevant to your new question. Be sure to include the Blender version that you are now using, and in this case, system characteristics such as CPU and GPU RAM sizes.