Not Enough Memory for Buffers

Product: Lightwave Revs: 2.0 3.1 3.5

Platforms: Amiga

Problem: When attempting render, these are the symptoms of not enough RAM to render the Scene in question:

"Not Enough Memory for RGB buffers": You are a little bit short of the required RAM.

"Not Enough Memory for z-buffers": You are more than a little bit short of the required RAM.

The System Crashes: You are way short of the required RAM.

To get more RAM available, you can shut down all other Amiga applications, and shut down any other Toaster applications, such as Modeler, CG, Toasterpaint. If you are using 4.1 software, you can use the LWStart ARexx routine to launch the Toaster or Flyer software without the Sequencer; doing so provides maximum RAM for Rendering. You cannot load Modeler if you do this, however, unless you exit Layout to the Switcher Screen, and use F8 to load the Sequencer, then re-enter Layout.

On some LightWave versions, the user could opt not to render the entire frame at once, and rendering in segments would reduce the amount of RAM required for a particular scene. This is why 3.1 and earlier versions were able to render high-res and print-res images on machines with relatively limited RAM.

Another approach to making the most of the RAM available is to use smaller image maps with smaller palettes. Image maps take up a lot of memory.

Virtual Memory software drivers can enable the system to treat some of the hard drive space as RAM, but this does have a penalty in speed.

Beyond these options, the solution is to increase RAM if the work you are doing is always straining the limits of your RAM resources.

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Amiga

Intel

MIPS

Alpha

Macintosh

SGI

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