About Blender Particle System Memory Usage and How To Optimize It

[bksbunnyhead]

Greetings Blender Artists users. I’m new to blender and this community

Recently I’m trying to make grass field render test with some grass model I’ve modeled myself

[ATTACH=CONFIG]394414[/ATTACH]

The problem is when creating this grass field, blender takes fairly high amount of RAM (peaks around 1.3 GB), considering my computer RAM is (only) 4 GB. I’m worried this will age my computer faster, and also I want to throw the grass model in my other scene which without the grass itself takes around 200 MB of RAM. I’m afraid when I apply the grass to the scene, my computer crashed.

The grass model is kept to be low poly (around 200 faces) and no subsurf/multires modifier applied. The field is a plane with dimension of 9.02x11.364 m with 200000 hair particles of duplicate group, length 2.00, and no children. Is there any way to minimizing the amount of RAM it takes? Closing and re-opening the app seems working, but eventually it will skyrocket to said amount. Buying a new pc with higher amount of RAM (or the grass essentials, perhaps) is very last solution for me, because I couldn’t afford it.

Any help/suggestion will be very appreciated. I couldn’t attach the .blend files somehow (perhaps due to my slow internet connection speed), and sorry for my english.

Cheers

[BiggR]

Not a lot that can be done other than:

• Only have grass in your field of view. Blender will look at everything, so if you don’t need it, weight paint it out.
• reduce the density of grass the further from the camera. Only have a high density close to the camera. Further away you can reduce it (weight gradient) and replace it with a grass image (if you need to)
• not sure if it does make a difference, but have you tried reducing the number of strands and adding children instead?

[bksbunnyhead]

@BiggR

Not a lot that can be done other than:

• Only have grass in your field of view. Blender will look at everything, so if you don’t need it, weight paint it out.
• reduce the density of grass the further from the camera. Only have a high density close to the camera. Further away you can reduce it (weight gradient) and replace it with a grass image (if you need to)
• not sure if it does make a difference, but have you tried reducing the number of strands and adding children instead?

Thank you very much, BiggR! I did reducing the number of strands to 5000 and adding children to 100, it works well now (greatly reduce memory to around 40 MB). I’ve tried it before, but somehow my computer crashed. Sorry for my late reply. I will try your another suggestion too.