Estimate Memory Usage

The Estimate Memory Usage operator will go through all the datablocks that would have to be loaded for rendering, and estimate how much memory is needed for each one. This is useful for knowing which blocks are the most memory consuming. Its button, shown below, can be found at the bottom of the renderset panel.

By clicking the button a report will be generated and opened in your browser, showing an estimation of how much memory each datablock will use.

This feature is Beta - Not all datablocks are taken into account

Since there is a wide variety of datablocks, not all of them will be taken into account. Meshes and images are calculated, but some types that use only a small amount of memory may be left out.

Use case scenario

Imagine you are trying to render a complex scene with many meshes and textures but Blender keeps crashing because the PC is running out of memory. You want to deactivate some of them to lower memory consumption but, how do you know what is using the most memory?

By using the Estimate Memory Usage you will be able to identify the biggest datablocks, deactivate or modify them, and try rendering again. While this solution is still fairly manual, it saves from having to make shots in the dark.

Estimated and real memory usage will differ

The estimated "total usage" will be much lower than the memory reported by Blender during render. The correlation between estimated memory usage and rendering memory usage is not linear, so this is not calculated by the addon operator.