question about memory and quitting Grasshopper

Hi everyone,

One of my definitions eats a lot of memory. I can sometimes bake the whole thing but I cannot render anything afterwards.

My solution is :

- after baking, I save the file from rhino as a 3dm file.

- I quit rhino.

- I re-open my 3dm file and do my rendering.

I had to quit rhino because when I look at the Task Manager, I can see I actually never quit grasshopper and its memory is not freed.

Is there a way to free and/or quit grasshopper without quitting Rhino ?

Thanks !

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on April 21, 2010 at 1:53am

When rendering lots of geometry it's important to control the mesh quality of the baked objects. Either use custom mesh and reduce quality or use the mesh command to generate mesh objects and delete the breps/surfaces. Meshes will use less memory than a surface or brep with an attached rendermesh. If you know what you are doing you could generate the meshes directly in grasshopper.

Also, a nice trick is to use the "selvisible" command. This will select the objects that are visible in the viewport, you can then invert the selection and hide everything else. Sometimes you'll have to activate some hidden things though (maybe you hide something that was supposed to be reflected, refracted, generate shadows, etc.). This command is also very useful when creating a "make2d" drawing.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 21, 2010 at 3:49am

Hi Olivier,

closing the Grasshopper window will not free any memory, but closing the grasshopper files inside the window should. I'll test that here again for 0.7 to make sure this actually happens.

You can probably free a bit more memory using the GrasshopperUnloadPlugin command, but the gains probably don't outweigh the costs. It doesn't actually unload the whole plugin, just a bunch of caches.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by taz on April 21, 2010 at 12:33pm

So normally GH caches aren't cleared until Rhino is closed?

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 21, 2010 at 12:35pm

Not the component library. Data inside ghx files should be unloaded when the files are closed, but all the runtime information is there to stay.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

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