Maya Starts Using All of my RAM after Running a Render

[grilloartwork]

Hey everyone,

I'm facing a issue in Maya: whenever I initiate a render in Arnold, Maya becomes incredibly sluggish and starts using basically all of my RAM (my system runs 15GB), which wasn't happening before.

This slowdown occurs right at the moment I press render, despite no major changes made to the scene apart from a couple of lights added.

The Maya scene is synced to Dropbox as part of a shared project. While I can't provide files, I can offer render configuration screenshots and logs if needed. The scene consists of three stylized characters in a room, Pixar-style, it has animation on it but I'm rendering a static image just for lighting purposes.

I've tried reducing samples and limiting threads, but the problem persists. Rendering even smaller portions of a 540p image takes an unreasonable amount of time.

The weird thing is that I was able to render some previews just fine before this problem occured, even in 1920x1080px. If RAM was a problem, it should've been a problem from the start, right? Also, I've tried rendering some other geometry in a separate new scene and had no problems doing that.

Thank you for your support.

Best regards,

[lee_griggs]

Is this CPU or GPU?

What does the RenderView say it is doing whilst it is hanging?

Yes, a log file would be useful.

Have you added anything else to the scene?

Are there any high-resolution texture maps?

Try removing things from the scene to try and identify what is hanging the render. Remove half the scene, if it persists then half it again until you identify what in the scene is causing the issue.

More details about the scene would be useful. Maybe Win+Shift+S it and paste it here.

[grilloartwork]

Hey, Lee, thanks for the reply.

- CPU

- It really varies. Sometimes it just says "rendering" but it never leaves 0% and my RAM usage goes through the roof to the point that, eventually I'll have to close Maya through task manager or forcibly shut down the whole computer. In some other cases, Arnold tells me the render was aborted due to some issue with an specific texture present in the scene.

- I tried finding the log but I think it only shows up when Maya crashes by itself right? Not when I close it through TM or shut down the computer, please, correct me if I'm wrong.

- Only arnold lights and a plane.

- Yes, there are, which I suspect is the main cause of my problem, the moment I press render, Arnold has to download all of the textures from Dropbox and I really believe that is what's causing the slowdown and crashing. Because I had some succesful attempts at rendering the scene once Arnold has downloaded all the maps, but everytime I have to reopen and re-render a scene it's a pain in the butt.

- What kind of details should I screenshot on the scene? I can't really show anything visual, but I can show configurations I'm using and things like that.

[lee_griggs]

> Arnold has to download all of the textures from Dropbox and I really believe that is what's causing the slowdown and crashing.

That sounds like the issue. Is there a reason the textures can't be saved and rendered locally?  

The log file can be saved from the Diagnostics tab in the Render Settings window.