Hi im trying to render smoke and it seems to run of out memory when im trying to test render in render view or even if i use the hrender from terminal.

I cached out my smoke to bgeo.gz and it hit the 100mil voxels about 1gb per frame size on disk and covers a distance of about 300units

So far i have tried,
-increasing volume step size from 1, 10 and 100
-test render at 1/2 HD rez
-changing pixel samples to 5 5
-volume shadow quality at 1.5
-microploygon method with 3 lights using depth map shadows of 1024
-default motion blur values

but i cant seem to get any tests…am i doing something wrong?

Specs of machine is 2.66ghz quad core and 8gb ram.

Is there another way i could render and maintain the level of detail?

Thanks

Hi

I rendered early on the volcano example, just to see if my machine could render 40 million voxels, using the volcano shelf tool sim time was around 32 mins render time was around 4 hrs for 125 frames at 1080i . The voxel division size was 0.09.That was on duel 6 core xeon machine and 24gigs of ram.
Maybe if your smoke is traveling over a large distance and the cause of the high voxel count you could cut things down by doing some instancing. See attached for a H12 file.Created by the fluid team at sidefx it is purely for testing from the beta period.

Rob

This might also help:
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini12.1/dyno/clustering [sidefx.com]

Thanks for the suggestions…those are very interesting concepts to explore.

Would definitely try them..but at another time perhaps.

I have some pointers from bunker in odforce and you might like to follow the thread if you're interested in some basic approaches to rendering volumes/smoke over here

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/15976-render-smoke-issue/ [forums.odforce.net]