Memory Settings

Memory Settings is an accordion on the Settings tab of the Settings window (Edit > General Settings, Alt+F9). Every number in it is a ceiling on work the app will otherwise refuse to do. Raising one buys exactly that much more and costs that much memory while the work runs; lowering one makes the app refuse sooner, with a message naming what would fit. Most sessions never need to touch it.

What these allow right now

The paragraph at the top of the accordion is recalculated as you drag the sliders below. It translates the budgets into results you can judge: how much memory a Rebuild may measure a model into (and roughly how many polygons come out), how large a grid Create Mesh may work on, how many MB a Flatten may keep per shape, and how many faces one subdivision level may reach. Use it to decide whether a change is worth it before you make it.

Detail budgets

Control	What it does	Default	Range
Flatten detail (million samples)	The most samples one Flatten may use. A flatten samples at half the voxel size unless this caps it, and a sampled shape rounds corners by about one sample: more keeps sharper corners on big shapes, but costs memory and makes the view slower to redraw while it changes. The grey line beneath shows the most MB it may use per flattened shape.	8	1–48 (48 is the most the preview can draw)
Create Mesh memory budget (MB)	The real limit on how fine a voxel size a model can be meshed at. The mesher walks the grid in slabs, so what it spends is the grid's cross-section — the third axis costs nothing. The grey line beneath shows the grid this affords, in cells square at any depth. Create Mesh and the preview both obey it, and a refusal names the voxel size that would fit.	1024	64–32768
Subdivision level ceiling (million faces)	The most faces one subdivision level may have. Each level has four times the faces of the one below, so this decides how many levels you get far more than the base mesh does: from a 20 thousand face base, 4 million allows three levels and 24 million allows five. What it really governs is whether sculpting stays interactive at that density on this machine.	64	1–1024
Sculpt detail (million samples)	The detail ceiling for Rebuild and for coming back from Sculpt. Both measure the surface into samples, keeping only the ones near it. Rebuild's cost follows the polygons (twice the polygons, twice the samples); coming back from Sculpt counts the whole box the model sits in, so twice the detail costs eight times the budget. When a request will not fit, the cell size is raised, and the log records the cell actually used. This is a peak while it samples, not what the document carries.	384	8–2048

Layer stack memory

Two extra RAM-saving tiers for the per-material layer stacks of the Layers panel. Every stack already gets background compression that is always on; turn these on only if deep, many-layer stacks are straining the machine's memory.

Control	What it does	Default
Enable disk swap for inactive layer stacks	Once resident layer memory crosses the budget below, the least-recently-used compressed layer stack is moved to disk entirely, freeing its RAM until it is painted into or viewed again. Unlike the background compression, it costs real disk I/O the moment it is on.	Off
Swap folder / Browse...	Where swapped stacks are written. Point it at a fast scratch disk if the drive the app is installed on isn't the machine's fastest. Left unset, a cache folder next to the app is used.	A cache folder next to the app
RAM budget before swapping	Total resident layer memory, across every material's layer stacks, allowed before the least-recently-used compressed stack starts moving to disk. 128 MB is the minimum.	1024 MB
Prefer tile-sparse storage for compressed layers	An alternative to the default whole-image compression for a large canvas with only a small painted area: only the touched regions are stored at all, so a mostly-empty layer restores almost instantly. A densely painted layer usually compresses somewhat worse this way, so leave it off unless your layers tend to be small details on a big canvas.	Off

The swap folder and budget are greyed out until disk swap is turned on.

GPU memory budget

GPU memory budget sets how much graphics memory painting and layer compositing may keep on the GPU. Automatic (0, the default) uses half of the graphics card's free memory. Past the budget the work moves to the CPU — slower, but it always works. Lower it if other programs need the graphics card at the same time.