i just created a small scene which includes a tracked scene, a mid lvl detailed object and a few particles which i made with Thinking Particles.
On my birth event there are only 1500 particles yet. There is no spawning going on.
When I render my scene without the particles in Vray, everything is just fine.
But when I switch to Krakatoa my problem starts.
When I hit render my RAM usage goes almost immediatley to the maximum and Max freezes so i have to close it via Taskmanager.
This is really strange because I already render a few hundred k of particles with Thinking and Krakatoa.
Im using Krakatoa v2.1.8.50654 node locked.
My system specs:
Win 7 64bit
Intel i7 3770
Nvidia GTX 560 Ti
Wow! Never seen anything like that (and I have a machine with the same amount of RAM and threads).
Obviously the memory usage is not from the particles in Krakatoa memory.
Let’s try to figure out where to look first:
*What version of TP are you using?
*Does it do the same if you create 25000 particles in PFlow?
*What happens if you switch Krakatoa to “Save Particles To File Sequence” and specify a PRT file to save? If the memory still goes up, then we know it is not directly Krakatoa’s fault because saving does not load particles into memory.
At this point I suspect some interplay between Krakatoa and TP that goes wrong, so the answers of the above questions will help us confirm or dismiss this suspicion.
If you can provide the scene so we can debug it, it would be even better. Please save as 2013 if you are using Max 2014.
First, here is my Max scene: docs.google.com/file/d/0Bw4YvYL … sp=sharing
It would probably say that something is missing, it should only be my viewport background, but I think that one isn’t important. If it is, I could send you that one too.
I think I found it out:
As i tested your suggestions I thought: Maybe something else in the scene is not working right because TP already worked perfectly fine with Krakatoa.
So I thought maybe my lights or so have such a high shadow resolution that it would take ages to render, maybe I hit it by accident.
So I looked at my directional light and the shadows were on “Vray Shadow Map”.
As soon as I switch it to the normal “shadow map”, Krakatoa renders beautifuly and with almost no RAM usage.
I still attached my scene, so that you can try that out for yourself, if you can recreate this behaviour.
Best regards
P.S.: My test result: With a very basic PFlow system with 25k of particles I had the same freeze.
Interesting.
We should make sure we skip VRay shadows and in the worst case use default 512x512 attenuation maps.
I thought we had some handling for this (it used to crash badly), but it is possible that it is making a huge map in memory.
Will log it again as a bug.
