I am using vray 2.00 on sketchup 2015 on a windows 7 machine. 16gb of ram 250 gb hard disk space.
I am taking the Meadow scene for a spin, except i can’t render it. I have trakced the issue down to a very large “current_skp.xml” file that is written so the scene can be sent to our local render farm. My little 250 gb laptop is running out memory because the file size written to disk is over 50 gb (at that point i run out of memory). Otherwise it works fantastic.
Double check that the elements you are scattering are components (and all the children), not groups. From what I remember, the meadow scene was all made of groups, which skatter makes thousands of copies of, and then vray thinks it has to hold all that info in memory
That did the trick. the vegetation in the scene were groups. i turned those into components and the xml file went down in size. it still does not render though. right now i have an xml clocking 800,000 kb in size appearing to be done writing but sketchup is stuck in the "writing xml’ phase reporting that it is still writing to the file.
I contacted Chaos to see if they have any insights. will report back what i learn.
ok, so on further inspection, if you are using Vray, you must turn components to proxies FIRST to get better memory usage. By turning the grass to a proxy first the xml file size is only a fraction of what i was getting before. i am down to 6 megs for a moderately vegetated scene.
Where is that xml file saved? I haven’t really checked mine during the render process, but I’d be interested to see what is going on.
As a side note, I have placed in hi poly trees and cars and they have rendered fairly quickly in skatter (though I’m using the “render only” switch, but that should not influence the geometry that vray has to parse out)
Note that if the components are turned into proxies first the file decreases in size exponentially. I was getting out of memory errors with file sizes in the 50 gig range. after turning to proxies file sizes where between 7 and 10 megs. Astonishing!
Wow. I can confirm a good reduction in size on my small test scene. With car components, my XML file is 18MB. Turned into proxies and then skattered, I’m looking at 2MB. Nice reduction in size, and you can imagine a large scene that has a lot of custom geometry would really benefit from proxies before scattering.