There were warnings on video tutorials on exceeding the DDR5 RAM on your graphics card - and these were from a guy who seemed to be running a 12Gb card - possibly a Nvidia  GTX Titan Xp.

Could anyone say just what happens when you do exceed the Video Card RAM? Crash? Blue Screen?

When I had a 4GB card and came close to exceeding it the system would slow WAY down, to the point where it just wasn't usable (much).  At that point, IIRC, it starts swapping to CPU memory and perhaps even disk memory, and in any case it just gets to the point where you don't want to work in iClone anymore.

I only have 8GB now but even VERY complex scenes work well within that.  I think that's a pretty manageable size (and I saw the same tutorial and wondered why in heck he actually got that big a scene -- IIRC, though, he was using that big desert set and perhaps it just wasn't well done.  I've used stuff by Stonemason that was FAR bigger with no problems, not even reaching half my memory.  Or maybe he just had a lot of characters in the background I didn't see -- I thought there were only three but perhaps there were more, or just very complicated clothing and such).

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Hi KT
Thanks for that.
I was just wondering why the guy would warn against doing this without stating what would happen if you did it anyway.
I've had a 4Gb of DDR5 GTX 970 for a couple of years and am beginning to think I had better upgrade.
But I am at least glad to discover that if I go over the limit there will be no scaly green hand coming out of the monitor to grab me.

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Hi Sean ,

It only slow your realtime work but you can use the Auxiliary light to manage your project then switch for render.
I take great inspiration of video game pippeline to decrease the need for memory . Instanciate props with the same texture, LOD, lowrez Albedo vs hirez Normal , etc....

When you exceed your available memory, expect performance to plummet, but it should not crash.

This is true if your graphics card (VRAM) has to swap data in-and-out with your regular memory (RAM).
It is also true if your RAM gets too full and has to swap data in-and-out with your disk drive (HDD or SSD).

"Swapping" is horrible.
If you have a 7GB scene, you are much better with a "slow" 8GB graphics card than a "fast" 6GB card, because the swapping will make the actual performance of the card almost irrelevant since it will spend a lot of time waiting for the correct data.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
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Hi mtakerkart

Thanks for that.

My interest is in making movies so the videogame pipeline is not necessary for me.

But thanks anyway.

Hi Sean,
   I'm "the guy" that did the tutorial , sorry i missed this post yesterday otherwise i could have given you a more clear answer. If you go to the 7:00 minute  timestamp of the 'gi basics: part one" tutorial, i do mention that if you exceed the video memory and start swapping with the systems memory  the scene becomes "unworkable". Unfortunately that was not enough information apparently, and if it happened to you i'm sure other people as well could have missed the meaning of that. For that i apologize, i will be more precise in the future, at least i got the point across that exceeding the video memory was bad.  :p . As mentioned in other replies here, swapping is bad. It slows things to a crawl. Thus the scene become unworkable. Also, as pointed out on the video and here, you could alleviate some of the  memory stress by working with auxiliary light on. 
   As far as memory usage, the scene i used was so detailed in textures and unique models, that you can drive on the Humvee all the way down the monument at the end of the street. and every frame will look as beautiful as the first one, I did this on purpose to demonstrate that  it does not matter how much ram you have on the video card, you can always use more. Not sure if you heard of  Moore's Law , if you haven't google it, very relevant to CG.   So Yes, i do have a titan Xp with 12 gigs. But the thing i wanted to make people aware was  that even if you do have a top of the line graphics card(or at least used to be), you could still run out of memory. Specially since GI and  models with all the proper textures needed for good PBR shading will eat a big chunk of it. And before you even realize  it you will be hitting swap. So always keep an eye on it. Turn Gi on every now and then to see how you are doing with memory. Remember that you will need memory for animation and effects. Such as simulation for physics on clothing and baking them, and many other things in order to finish your movie. Optimizing in iclone is critical,  Even if you are not making scenes for game export. You always want to keep that FPS as fast as possible. 
  Hope this clarify things for you a bit more and if you have any more questions please do not hesitate to ask. I promise i will not come out of your screen and get you if you do!  

Sincerely,
Cris
AKA Stuckon3d

PS: I will do a tutorial on how to optimize scenes in the future and what to look for when importing models from outside vendors. 





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Hi stuckon3d, many thanks for the detailed answer.

Yeah - I am always aware that I am working on a machine that has hardware limitations even though Moore's Law - if it can summon the strength to go through a few more iterations - may ease the problem. Back in the day the result used to be referred to as 'graceful degradation'.

A lot of this can be solved temporarily as far as movies are concerned by the same kind of cheats that have been applied on stage plays and cel animation: so a bush becomes a flat 2D bush but limits are therefore implied as to how much the camera can move - or maybe in iClone you can tell the bush always to look at the camera.

I love the approach to photo-realism that iClone is taking and I admire them for it. But realistically the most popular TV cartoons at the moment are series such as The Simpsons and South Park, which run on voice actors and the strength of their story lines. I cite these series because the animation in both is laughably primitive compared to iClone 4 let alone iClone 7.

And again if you are doing topical political satire it is more than a little surprising to find that people recognize caricatures far more readily than they recognize exact copies. 3Dtest produced some wonderful heads of political figures which take a moment to recognize; but the cartoonists in the media produce quick simple crude caricatures - yet these are instantly correctly attributed to the real life politicians meant.

So in the end, for me it is Mix 'n Match: if you want to make the people laugh an easily resolved scene is the way to go, reducing the cognitive burden, staying simple. But if you want to evoke the full range of human emotions then you need IMHO the photo-realistic look - and also the photo-realistic movement and natural human reactions which I hope we are approaching.

Incidentally - thanks about not coming out the screen to get me.

Those are interesting thoughts, Sean, and I'd like to add my two dollars (due to inflation): if you look at something like Wallace and Grommit (which are caricatures of real people, bordering on the grotesque)  the animator still manages to get the full range of human emotions (including some very touching and lovely moments).  Now, they are claymation, but much the same approach could be done with iClone and Character Creator.

So I think there is a middle ground between reducing that cognitive burden so much we don't recognize them as living creatures, and going photo-real (which in itself has perils as we approach the uncanny valley).  I'd like to see more folks doing that W&G style of animation because I think iClone lends itself well to it, even using semi-realistic backgrounds and motions.  It's certainly one I intend to explore.

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Hi Kt, Thanks for the kind words.

I may not have expressed myself clearly enough when I talked about the human range of emotions.

What I was attempting to say was about the audience, not about the avatars.

I wish to evoke audience reaction more than I want to imitate emotions with my avatars.

I reckon that the Disneyish desire to get the audience to laugh AND cry is rooted in photo-realism. You can have caricatured Seven Dwarves- Dopey et al - but for the Love's First Kiss bit you had a reasonably realistic prince and a reasonably realistic Snow White designed to get the audience to smile and tear up. Reasonably being 1930s cel animation.

I am suggesting that you can evoke laughter in the audience with Wallace and Gromit caricatures but the rest of the emotions in the human range - no. I remember a Tom and Jerry cartoon where after much failure Tom was driven to drink. He was shown in a low-class drinking den, hitting the milk.

It was a cheap laugh - but why not - it was just a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Now, as iClone users and as you yourself say, if I understand you rightly, we want to hit a broader set of audience reactions than just laughter. And for that we probably need some photo-realism, enough to do say Spielberg's Tintin movie. If you have the right screenplay you should be able to get the punters to shed a few tears.