general bucket render faults

[shadowphile]

I'm rendering long-term hi-rez images and am dismayed to come back and find black squares.  The only solution I can think of is to attempt to re-render just those regions manually using the cropping option and do some photoshop layering, but that's a lot of work.
What causes the faults and anything I can do to eliminate them?
thanks,
Matt

[RArcher]

Generally running out of RAM is the cause.  Reduce detail, or resolution, or work in crop areas, or less vegetation, etc.  The 64 bit version when it is finished should eliminate most of these problems I would expect.

[shadowphile]

Thanks, nice to know it's not something in the rendering itself.

Blender has improved it's memory limits issues on 32-bit Windows by implementing something called large-address-aware in the compiler.
It allows single apps to use up to 2.5G instead of 1.5G, a significant if not exponential increase.  (still need the RAM of course) Any chance of that in the pipeline?  Seems like a fairly simple upgrade if it's just a compiler flag.

[jo]

Hi,

TG2 already sets the large address aware flag.

Regards,

Jo

[Oshyan]

You will need either the /3gb (large address) flag set to on in Windows XP/Vista or, better still, a 64 bit OS to take advantage of large address awareness in an app like TG2. That and more than 4G of RAM.

- Oshyan

[shadowphile]

Given my application, I can't really drop the rez nor the detail, might be able to tweak some other things down with some (slow) experimentation.
I have to eventually eliminate the GI option anyway for cube faces (and replace with, oh, 4 lights?).  Will that step cause a significant drop in time and/or memory usage?

[domdib]

Eliminating GI will almost certainly cut render times.

[shadowphile]

Hmmm, I'm actually getting twice the render time when I replace GI with 3 scattered ambient light sources.

[Henry Blewer]

Use only one light with the shadows turned on.