Best practice to delete unused items from Scene tab?

RenderPretender

Is it best practice to delete unused items from the Scene tab rather than merely making them invisible? If so, I have developed a bad habit of not doing that, and I wonder if I'm causing some periodic RAM deficits and/or crashes by leaving invisible items in the scene. Am I correct in assuming that such items have to be recalculated in RAM for subsequend scenes even if they are invisible/turned off?

Also, I tend to render hair at a SubD level of at least one, with a smoothing modifier, to reduce sharp edges. Is this a RAM-expensive or counterproductive practice?

Thank you.

Leana

When you say "make invisible" do you mean turn them off in scene hierarchy (with the eye icon) or from the surface pane?

An item which is invisible due to surface settings only will use resources as the render engine needs to compute the surface settings to consider it it as invisible.

I'm not sure it is passed to the render engine if it's turned off in the scene.

 

As for subD level, you're basically multiplying the polygon number by 4 for each subdivision level, so yes it will use more resources to use higher subD.

RenderPretender

Leana said:

When you say "make invisible" do you mean turn them off in scene hierarchy (with the eye icon) or from the surface pane?

An item which is invisible due to surface settings only will use resources as the render engine needs to compute the surface settings to consider it it as invisible.

I'm not sure it is passed to the render engine if it's turned off in the scene.

 

As for subD level, you're basically multiplying the polygon number by 4 for each subdivision level, so yes it will use more resources to use higher subD.

Yes, I turn them off in the scene. I thought I read somewhere that they still consume memory resources even if they are turned off, or out of the camera view, as I believe they still get inventoried into system memory when the scene loads. And thanks for the confirmation of my suspicion regarding the SubD.

Leana

Items out of the camera view will definitely use resources, the render engine needs to load them as part of the scene as they could create shadows or reflections for example.

bytescapes

Yes, objects that you have hidden using the eye icon will be loaded when the scene loads. You can confirm that for yourself: hide an object, save the scene, reload the scene, then click the eye icon to reveal the object -- it will appear instantly, because it's already loaded. If it wasn't loaded, there'd be a -- possibly lengthy -- delay after you clicked the eye icon.

In short, to save memory you want to delete any object that you're sure you don't need.

The eye icon is useful to hide objects temporarily. For instance if you're doing a dForce simulation, and you have Mike, Vicky, and Vicky's long hair in the scene, you'd want to hide Mike so that the dForce engine doesn't need to take him into account while simulating Vicky's hair. Or if you have so many characters in your scene that your GPU can't cope with all their textures at once, you might want to turn off individual characters and do multiple renders -- first with one character, then with the next, and so on -- then composite the resulting renders using a graphics program. The eye icon is good for that.

 

RenderPretender

bytescapes said:

Yes, objects that you have hidden using the eye icon will be loaded when the scene loads. You can confirm that for yourself: hide an object, save the scene, reload the scene, then click the eye icon to reveal the object -- it will appear instantly, because it's already loaded. If it wasn't loaded, there'd be a -- possibly lengthy -- delay after you clicked the eye icon.

In short, to save memory you want to delete any object that you're sure you don't need.

The eye icon is useful to hide objects temporarily. For instance if you're doing a dForce simulation, and you have Mike, Vicky, and Vicky's long hair in the scene, you'd want to hide Mike so that the dForce engine doesn't need to take him into account while simulating Vicky's hair. Or if you have so many characters in your scene that your GPU can't cope with all their textures at once, you might want to turn off individual characters and do multiple renders -- first with one character, then with the next, and so on -- then composite the resulting renders using a graphics program. The eye icon is good for that.

 

Thanks to bytescapes and all! Time for me to lose my impractical habit by deleting what I don't need.