Viz 2007 Rendering Problems

[info.152907]

Hello there

We have the following problems:-
When we start adding lights our scenes take forever to render
Boxes appear saying we are running low on virtual memory
Boxes also appear saying certain bitmaps will not appear in the render...and they don't!
In perpective mode / Smoothe / highlights the scene keeps turning to wireframe by itself

What do we need to improve the process as we made sure our computer was the specification Viz 2007 required

Our machine spec is

AMD AThlon 64 processor 3800+
2 GB of DDr2 ram
Nvidea G Force 6800GS Grahpics card
250 gig Hard drive with 233 GB spare

Can anyone please HHHHHHHEEEEELP??

[aaronrumple]

How many lights? Lots of lights can indeed take a liong time.
What rendering engine? Scanline? Mental Ray? Radiosity? Vray? Each has different memory requirements.

The issue of the scene turning from shaded to wireframe is part of the adaptive degradation - a Viz setting. It does this when running low on memory. As information is returned from the cache or memory is freed, then the view will shade again.

Everything points to a simple out of memory issue. Most likely your scene is too big or complex. How many polys is it? Do you have larged scanned images for materials?

If you're rendeing mental ray or vray, you might need to network render to speed things up.

[Steve_Bennett]

In addition, if you are running a 64 bit system, why are you only running 2gb of RAM? bump that up to 8 or 16 gigs of ram and see what happens. Aaron makes some good points too about materials. Just cause you make the minimum specs for a program doesn't mean the sky is the limit. Thats a starting point. You can try setting VM to be 4 times the amount of ram installed as another rule of thumb. Depending on how big your scene is it just might never render. You might need to get into compositing or texture baking to cut down on geometry complexity along with a handful of other things you could try.