hello,

Im finding i hit a brick wall with inkscape around 1500M of Ram. I have 32 G available.  Everything slows way down and sometimes locks up, and long projects get impossible to finish and i have to use tricks like moving layers instead of copy paste..  Is there anyway i can fix this and open it up? i tried running via my GPU but it defaults back to the regular running environment. I noticed it does this even when exporting to .png although it seems to crank up the i9 CPU to almost full.

I'd be grateful for any help.  This software is awesome (and thank you!)

Hi sBass,

I wish I could help you with the RAM issues, but I am relatively ignorant about such things. I do want to say, however, that the leaves on those house plants look fantastic! I feel like every time I try to use the color green, it ends up looking like something out of a children's coloring book. You seem to have found some magical way to identify the correct shades of green to make the leaves look real. I especially like the shading on the plant in the foreground.

As I say, I wish I could be more helpful with regard to RAM issues. One possible workaround would be to create separate files for different areas of the illustration, so that you can continue to advance in the meantime. Another idea -- and I sincerely don't know whether this actually makes a difference or not -- would be using clones instead of copy-and-pasting for some of the more similar-looking leaves. I wish I could be of more help. And if you can share any of your secrets for picking the right shade of green, I would be all ears. Best of luck!

--ML

Filters and blurs will slow performance dramatically. I'd reduce use of those as much as possible.

Multiple identical objects like leaves can be clones or symbols to reduce processing.

File>Clean Up Document can delete hidden code that is not being used.

@TylerDurden

What i'm saying is i bought a buff laptop with a plethora of resources specifically for this type of work, but now i can't seem to get Inkscape to utilize the resources i have available.  I don't use a lot of filters but blurs are a necessity to blend the colors.  I use the cloning process but often alter the dimensions or shading to make it slightly different.  I did try the clean up doc and it helped a bit, but man this becomes slow work when you start approaching that threshold of 1.5G. Is this part of the engine of the system?  no way to open it up? i find my self save crawling just in case.... 

@em1000 Thanks so much for the kind words, i think the trick is really in the shading itself, and i use CMYK mostly because i do t-shirts too.  the process was to find a BMP of a leaf, trace it with the bezier to a closed loop, then pick a swatch block. each leaf has three textures, the main color will be a light middle shade like #8dd35f, the darkest shade for creases/shadows like #2d5016 with a light blur no stroke (or same color) and then accent with a lighter color like #C6A9EF and a higher blur.  The dull greens seem to work better IMO. I make 2-3 leaves, make the stalk, then duplicate each leaf a few times.  before dropping on the plant i size and distort by rotation with select and transform, and put slight rotations on each leaf.  no more than 2 plants per layer to keep it from crashing.  It's kind of a long process but i think it pays off in the end!

Whew.  Clean up doc got me this far, one more stage to go!