Help : geometry shader + crowd = memory issues

[mayi]

Hi ,

Need suggestions on the following questions , any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance. I did some homework before starting this post, but I wasn't able to find a good answer.

Context : I am implementing a crowd rendering pipeline in Maya using mental ray geometry shaders. Inside the geometry shader, I am using some 3rd geometry API to read 3rd party geometry cache from disk to define the geometries using mi_api_object_callback() function.

But I found a memory issue that when I have a lot of geometry shaders in a Maya scene and render the scene, the memory usage starts to increase and then I get some error in my 3rd party API calls when the memory is almost full.

In mental ray manual , there is a mi_mem_memory_limit() function, but I also can't find it in the header files.

[haggi]

A geometry shader call with mi_api_object_callback() should be executed only if the bounding box is hitted by any ray. And if you have no memory limit set in maya, mentalray will take all the memory it can get and if it hits the limit, it will try to free any memory if possible.

So following your description, it is possible that is indeed a 3rd party issue. And it depends a lot if how you use the 3rd party geometry. I suppose you do request some geometry data from the application, generate your mentalray geometry and thow away the now useless 3rd party geometry data.

It's more guessing than knowing, but I suppose you have a closer look at how your 3rd party geometry is used, maybe threre is a command to delete the requested data from memory.

You will need mi_mem_allocate() only if you need to allocate memory for your own data that should be managed by mentalray, otherwise you will have to manage it yourself.

[mayi]

Thanks and sorry for my late reply. Finally the memory issue was resolved which was not Mental Ray problem.