Program Crashes! Please Help!

[lm420]

Hi guys! I have been a big fan of all your wonderful posts and I must say I learned a lot from checking this forum on and off and pardon me if I just leech out info but never have contributed but once I learn a few tricks, I will definitely share as well. I am fairly new using Sketchup and Vray, only 10 months but have been successful in most small sized renderings that are generally 100mb and below.

Please allow me to give you more info on what I use: DELL Precision T1500 Desktop Intel (R) Core (TM) i7 CPU 860 @2.80GHZ 1.17GHZ, 2.96 GB of RAM, and/or MacBook Pro 15" Intel (R) Core (TM) i5 CPU m520 ,2.40ghz, 8gb RAM. Sketchup 6 for modelling and Vray 1.0 for rendering.

My main problem is, I have basically modeled a 1064sqm house with a really huge lawn, the total size of the model as of now is already 120mb and just have 3 units of clip-mapped trees. I normally render using provided .visopts, particularly the gi_irmap_high.visopt. Once I start pressing the render button, initially it will start rendering but after a few minutes, there is a bug splat that comes out , or if not , there will be a prompt bar that says I don't have enough memory in my Temp folder, or the typical " The instruction at "0x01282e9d" referenced memory at "0x00133000". The memory could not be "read" "

I'm not sure how you guys do it, but I assume this kind of project is not so big compared to huge development projects, etc. It is just basically one big house and I can't come up with a nice landscaped output.

If you guys have any idea on what the problem is, please do let me know. My main speculation is the size of the file, that's the main reason why I bought a semi-high powered Macbook Pro but it seems that i'm missing out on something here. Please help

[brodie]

Couple thoughts. You could try deleting/hiding parts of your model until it's able to export. That could give you a better idea of where the problem area is that's causing the crash.

If you think it's a memory issue (and it sounds like it may be), then the question is how can you optimize. 120 mb is a very large SU file. Where is all that memory coming from. Typically it's going to either be geometry or textures. Unless you have loads of 3d modeled grass in that large lawn of yours, it's almost definitely coming from textures. You've probably got a number of high resolution textures applied within your SU model. SU saves the texture within the .skp rather than just referencing it like most programs would. So if you have a 10kb model of a box and apply a 20mb texture to it and save you'll end up with a 20mb .skp file. I'm not sure how Vray for Su works in this regard but you may need to optimize your textures somehow. With Maxwell render I can save a super low resolution file with a lot of compression and use that in my SU model, then tell Maxwell that this LowRes image relates to a maxwell material which contains high res textures - at export time, it replaces my low res image with the high res texture for rendering purposes. If that's not an option in Vray, you may still need to use some lower resolution textures and maybe save them as .jpg's with some compression to them to get the file sizes down.

-Brodie