Hi all!
I decided to try out global illumination on a new PC we have at work, so I made a simple scene with one simple object illuminated by 545 spots in a half-sphere (dupliverts). Now the problem is that Blender crashes! Too little virtual memory. Blender is the only app running and my virtual mem is 266 MB.
Other info:
Blender 2.22
Pentium 4
1 GHz
256 MB RAM
Any ideas?
Hans Petter :-?
Found the answer myself (asking a question gets your own brain moving sometimes!). It turned out BufSi of 2560 was a little bit too much. I lowered it to 512 and everything was fine.
Sky-sphere lighting is NOT global illumination. Global illumination (or GI for short) reffers to the globabl interaction of light among all objects. Radiosity is an example of a limited kind of globabl illumination. More complete models of global illumination are present in renderers such as Lightflow (with caustics, soft-shadows, reflections and refractions, diffuse light interaction, etc.).
Now, granted, this is simply an issue of termanology. However, termanology can be very important, since it is what allows you to communicate with other people effectively. Thus, I figured I might as well point out that you are using termonology–which is already in place–incorrectly.
Another example of mis-used termonology is the term “radiosity”. Radiosity, it turns out, is NOT the “color bleeding” effect. Rather, it is a very specific way of calculating that color bleeding, by dividing the scene into many polygons. The color bleeding effect is actually reffered to as “diffuse light interaction”.
As many of you may have noticed, I have used the term “radiosity” incorrectly myself. However, once I learned that I was using it incorrectly, I stopped doing so. Please do the same with “GI”.
As a side note, another much easier way to achieve sky-sphere, or “hemisphere”, lighting is to use the “hemi” light source type. Unluckily, this will not calculate shadows or specularity correctly. But it does calculate the diffuse lighting correctly. The specular lighting really isn’t all that important (it still looks fine), and the shadows can be faked by using a very blurry spot-light.
There is a tut on my site on fake GI and so on, if you are interested the link is at the bottom of this post 
Stefano
P.S. more than 500 spots is definitely too much!