I keep getting a Renderama camera error (see attached).  Error= “Could not allocate GI buffer. Allocation size given”

How do I debug this?  Snapshots and screen size renderings work fine, as did previous Renderama full size renderings… until I sent it for final render… well you know the story.

Anyone fix this before?
Yon

PS I’d post it, but I’m out the door to catch a plane soon, after I wake up.

Hi Yon,

Render in strips (or more strips), your project it too large to be rendered in one go.

Ian

Ian,
Thanks for the tip.  I tried 4 strips, and it didn’t go.  I’ll try 8.  It’s strange when something works at full resolution, and then just stops with very few changes.  Even the small previews were returning this message, except the allocation number went down to 0.

Do you have any idea where the bottle neck is.. RAM?
Yon

Hi Yon,

Yeap, I assume the error occurs at “Shading GI Buffer” ?

Try 20 strips

It depends very much on: Number of polygons, number of samples, size of render. With that info we should be closer to the source.
Ian

Ian,
You are correct when it occurred. 

Now how (and in which way) does my computer need to be bigger to handle this?  The Apple Store is so close

Yon

Make sure you have allocated memory to Camera on all your slaves and on the main machine.

Matt,
there doesn’t seem to be an issue there, when it was crashing (right now it’s working… fingers crossed) only a fraction of RAM was being used by the cameras.  I even tried to use only one camera with all of my available ram allocated to it, and several strips. Apparently not enough. 

Right now with more strips, it’s humming along happily.

So it’s a RAM issue with GI Buffer?

Yon

Matt, Ian,
thanks for the help.  It worked.  It was supposed to be a quick mock-up for some friends, and then crash..
And now it’s done.  Not the prettiest, but not bad for a days work,
take care,

Yon

The images are 6000 wide, and of course need plant life.  But favors only go so far before vacations

Yon

Sorry but what are strips and how do you set them up?

Slave1

Hi Nick,

If you set up network rendering (render information > network) - you can set a number of ‘frame strips’ for a still image in the box there. This will slice your image up horizontally, allowing you to render a single image on several machines at once - it also allows for large GI renders.

Hi Yon,

The GI buffer stores information about your scene in RAM, the larger your image (polys and pixels) the more information it needs to keep. So for example:

Rendering 8 million polys with GI at 600px wide = fine.
Rendering 8 million polys with GI at 6000px wide = strips needed.

Generally when rendering a large image, I always use strips.
Best,
Ian

Edit: Horizontal, vertical, potato, tomato…

If I may add to this strip thing, let say you have an image like Yon’s second house up here, and you use 4 strips for 4 processors. The first strip is mostly sky and the last strip is mostly grass and asphalt. Easy job so the first and last processors will happily render their strips easily and very fast while the second and third processors will struggle with the middle strips… When done, processor 1 and 4 will just stay there, idle.
Using more strips, lets say 8, when a processor is finish with an easy part of the image, it will be given another strip by Renderama. So no more processor taking a break while the others work their *ss out… On complex images (GI, chrome, glass, lots of lights...) I often use 20 strips to keep my processors happy…

Just to follow up on what Richard said, I have absorbed the wisdom and started rendering large numbers of strips.  I still use the crop feature in render to avoid the extra sky altogether.  That not withstanding, this set up works very well.  I’ve run into a few render glitches when using the layers shader (one strip renders GI incorrectly to the layer), but I haven’t been able to reproduce them… As Ian once suggested, the number of slaves I now use is one less than the machine has processors (not sure how that works with a single processor machine ) and that keeps the general state of the system from bogging down tooooo noooothiiinggg.

Thanks for all the ideas,
Yon