UE4 eating up the whole 32gigs of RAM in no time

Development Rendering
1

Hello,

I have a large number of meshes+materials imported from an FBX.
When attempting to place them all in the world, the editor hangs and in about 3 minutes, it suddenly starts to eat up all the 32gig RAM, linearly. It’s just slowly taking all of it, then crashes and throws an OutOfMemory exception, leaving half the system apps crashed too from not having enough memory. What can I do to prevent this and place the assets in the world without killing the RAM?

Thanks

2

Just how complex is your setup ? UE4 devs recommended 32gig as a ceiling in general but depending on scene complexity, ya much more can be needed.
I have headaches atm mainly ,from UE4 forcing far too many mateial recompiles on ordinary practices .

Would LOVE to know what devs did to cause this mess.

3

It depends on what you’re doing. For example the open world example from Epic takes up 24GB to load.

4

Well, it’s not that much. It’s from a 300MB FBX, around 3000 meshes in total, but they’re all small in size. It’d be hell to add them to the world in parts, as I’d never guess the correct placement. That’s why I need to add them all at once. Hell, it’s not even that much, as you said, the open world example is far larger and includes advanced lighting and foliage and still loads with 24gigs of RAM. I don’t get it.

5

Do all meshes / materials have to be visible simultaneously? If not, then LODs and visibility changes could suffice.

6

What about textures?

7

yeah, all of them need to be visible at once. yeah, the materials are autogenerated from textures that were a part of the FBX, attached to the meshes. after importing, UE4 created the materials by itself (I mean, there are materials already, so I guess it created them automatically)

8

This may be a longshot, but here’s a suggestion for reducing the memory usage:

  1. Open the generated material(s)’ in the Material Editor, click an empty area of the grid to bring up the details panel in the lower left
  2. In details panel, scroll down to the list of options that say, “Use with…” and a subsequent actor / object type, and uncheck any that are checked so all are unchecked / disabled for the specific ones
  3. Leave that last one checked that is a general option
  4. Click Apply & Save
  5. Go to Viewport, remove all actors from the scene, and restart engine
  6. Redo placing of actors in the scene