high poly site view, slow viewport

[sajid haq]

hi folks, i am currently doing a housing project, there are 32, eight storey buildings of 5 different types. each building has around 30,000 faces, check the test rendering in attachment.
all the blocks are more or less like this one and it has around 27000 faces. is it ok for a model like this? or i should reduce the faces more?
moreover the viewport is quite slow, i have an opteron 165 with 1gb ram and 7900gt pcie card. and its surprising that only with 27k faces its so slow and it scares me to think that i have to place 32 blocks like these on the site plan.
rendering time is not a problem for me right now since only rendered images are required not the animation.
i am sure there are many ppl here who have done many projects like this. can you share the method you use for high poly site scenes like these?
thank you all in advance for sharing your knowledge.

[Brian Kitts]

in regards to polygon count... it more or less depends on your rendering engine versus memory. For instance vray will tear through the polygons, as long as your system has enough memory. I'm not sure what your rendering engine is, but if you aren't having any memory issues I wouldn't worry about it (yet)

As for viewport performance, if you are placing blocks that are complete and no longer need to be edited you can select the whole object right-click and go into object properties and tell it to display by bounding box only. Or if you definately aren't editing it anymore, save the block in it's own file and then xref that file into your main scene.

I'm currently working on a large campus animation and I have every seperate building xref'd into the main scene independently. That way I can go into the xref manager and just turn each or all of the buildings on and off quickly so they don't slow down the viewport for what I'm currently working on.

Your last option is to go into the viewport configuration and turn on display nth faces, and it will cut down the number of displayed polygons (but I really don't like the display on this method... I prefer the first two options).

[sajid haq]

thanks for the quick and helpful answer. i am using vray as my rendering engine. and my blocks arent going to need any editing once they are placed on site. infact ive done modeling blocks and they are almost ready to be placed. xref seems to be good option. i used xref in my last housing project and had some issues (max 7). i have two question.
1- do you use xref and display the proxies of original model to work with?
2- have you tried using vray proxies on a complete 3d model of a house? i am using it with much success with my onyx trees.

[Brian Kitts]

1- do you use xref and display the proxies of original model to work with?

yes... but i turn the display on the xref's "off" quite often.

2- have you tried using vray proxies on a complete 3d model of a house? i am using it with much success with my onyx trees.

I use onyx as well and I always proxy any tree that I put into the scene unless it's a really simple scene.

attached is a screenshot of the large scene I'm currently working on.... every different colored building is a seperate xref, and the street is lined with proxy trees.... if I have any slow down in the viewport all i do is turn the visability of some of the xref'd buildings off....

[sajid haq]

looks a very complicated and high poly scene. looking forward to see the final rendering. btw the buildings in the background are detailed?
i just tried converting my model into vrayproxy and it worked very good. had to clean up the model alot first though. i instanced the proxy and made 40 copies to test and the result is impressive.
thanks for showing the way.