Stability issues w Keyshot 3 Pro 32 bit

[DriesV]

Hi,

We are getting many, many crashes using Keyshot 3 Pro 32 bit. Even trying to save a freshly imported model will often make KeyShot crash. Opening up the EV gallery, when a model has been imported, often brings KeyShot (OR the PC ) to its knees as well.
We import STEP files, preferring highest tesselation quality. The models that are imported have many fine fillets and the resulting bip file easily reaches 700 MB (which is still pretty moderate, no?) in size. KeyShot runs on a PC with an Intel Pentium E5800 (3,2 GHz), 3.5 GB of usable RAM and Windows 7 32 bit.
When using lighter models and bip files very few stability (crashing) issues are seen. I thus expect the problem to be related to memory.

We haven't had such crashes (atleast not so frequently) on KeyShot trial versions on 64 bit machines with +7 GB RAM, using the same workflow on the same models.

So, is this a memory problem?

P.S. We are using KeyShot 3 Pro 3.0.99 32 bit. Today KeyShot was fully removed and reinstalled from scratch.

greetings,
Dries

[guest84672]

Most likely your are running out of memory. A 700MB file is not a problem for KeyShot to handle. With a 32 bit system, you can only address 3GM of RAM. 1 GB is already taken up by the OS itself. This will give you only 2GB to work with. And at the highest tessellation setting, you will generate pretty large KeyShot files.

[DriesV]

I would gladly set the tesselation at a lower setting, but I don't always know from the get-go what the model will be used for. It could be only full product shots, but it could also be close-ups of small details. That is why I tend to stick to the highest possible tesselation quality.

At the time of purchase, the purpose of the PC was simple DTP work. It has recently stretched to full-blown rendering. And now this machine seems to choke on much of our KeyShot work.

This should be an interesting case for our IT guys to at least switch the OS over to 64 bit and bump up the RAM.

[guest84672]

An OS upgrade to 64bit and additional RAM is pretty inexpensive to do.

[DriesV]

I think I nailed it!

We work from a network location where I have copied all local KeyShot resources.
I had copies of the KeyShot config XML file, both locally and in the network folder. The local XML having the correct network paths to the KeyShot resource folders and the copy on the network still having local paths (copied right after installation of KeyShot). I thus removed the XML on the network.
I have also put backslashes instead of slashes in the local XML for the KeyShot resources paths.

After doing this I can happily import STEP data, save it, apply materials/lighting, resave it and not shed a tear in pure agony. 
Saving also goes a lot quicker now. Much more stable experience.

greetings,
Dries

[guest84672]

Ahh - glad to hear it is all working now. Thanks for the update!