IClone 7 - Video Memory Inquiry
I have a I7 3.4 GHZ to 4 GHZ Processor and a GTX 1060 3GB Video Card and when I open smith house , one character and add a camera - I've already used all my Video Ram
It bounces around from about 2.5 or 2.7 to 3.5 to , 3,7 or similar -
Is that a pretty common video ram usage for the program ! It seems excessive and I'm not experiencing any system bog down -
I couldn't imagine needing that much video ram for such a limited amount of content  -

What's Up ?

What is smith house project? Did you try to turn the GI feature off?  The realtime Gi needs serious amount of Ram. That's why UDK or unity bake the "Lights" on  textures.

If you have VXGI enabled, it adds at least a gig-and-a-half. If you turn it off, you'll be similar to iC6. The PBR really doesn't use more than before.
Right most icons in the toolbar are VXGI enable/disable.

That does like a huge model. It may not by high-poly, but it has a lot of textures. It says that home 2 has 190 items. All of them are textured, so it may actually be that much.

Is it modular so you can just use parts?

Also, In the iClone preferences, you can set the realtime texture a bit lower if you have it set high. That's just in case there are some really high-resolution textures in the model.

Can you try the same model in iC6?

The GI does use a lot of VRAM for the preview display, but you can render with it whether or not you use it in the preview. That's why there in an "on" button and a "Preview" button. So if you want to conserve VRAM on your card, just turn the GI on, and the "Preview GI" off. You can always turn it on to spot-check, and turn it off again. That's what I do, with my 2 gig of VRAM.

Also, it just uses system RAM after the VRAM is full. It'll just knock the preview frame rate down quite a bit. 

There is not. However, you can use a tool such as GPU-Z (https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/), which lets you monitor VRAM usage, as well as temperature.

It's unfortunate that GI uses so much VRAM. I use it lot once I discovered the beauty of emissive objects in IC7. But, as Rampa mentions, if there is not enough VRAM, regular RAM will be used.

The problem in my case is that when I turn GI off in preview, my scene is dark...

To circumvent that a bit, there is a new feature in IC7 called the Aux light. It's a project setting and allows you to see better in case the lighting is low or want to use GI but can't during Preview.

One more thing... (it's past my bedtime... ) I've found that if you select Quick Shading for preview, you can still use GI, but you'll use less resources.

And even though I have 8GB of VRAM, I've run into a situation were I went over that. It was a scene with a number of objects with many textures. So in IC7, you have to do much more in optimizing your scene and split it up into just what is visible in a scene.

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Thanks guys for the Great Information and Tips  ! Recovering and saving ram is very resourceful for most projects. Seeing what's going on in the scene always helps me too ! AUX ! ^ 5
They have a post on using the GI here also with several links ,examples and explanations as well  that may benefit people who have over looked it.
https://forum.reallusion.com/315348/GI04-Basic-Operating-Process-GI-Settings-1
https://forum.reallusion.com/315352/GI05-GI-Settings-2 

Yes, thank you for the good information.  I was a bit worried last night because I was showing 6.5/4.0 gb vram ... but actually performance wasn't all that bad, so I was wondering if I were reading it right.  I've got 16gm ram, so if it's using ram to fill the gap, maybe that's all right.  I'm actually using iclone right now to create still images rather than an actual video, so I'm not too worried about final performance.