ARRRGGG! poly count hell!

[justintime1]

Hi folks

ARRRGGG! poly count hell!

I’m working on a large housing scheme made up form many different house types and apartment blocks.

The client wants detailed close up view of the separate house types showing every little detail and yet at the same time they also want a scheme over view render showing the site as a whole with all the different houses and apartment buildings in situation.

Now its come to bringing all the components together my computer is really struggling and I get an out of memory error when ever I try and take a test render , and iv not even moved on to the landscaping as yet…

Eccck!

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated .

the models info is this

41954 kb

154396 polys...

its a monster , see images...

Attached is also a finished image of a different job (For the same client) that used the same house types but with far less of them. The new model uses nearly twice as many houses.

Many thanks Matty.

[Fernando Lino]

I'm not familiar with C4D..but seems to me that 40MB is a huge file for only 150k polygons...maybe, you have trash information on it(purge it).

I'd make another roof..just flat planes for the aerial view....and keep the detailed roof for the close up views

[ZFact]

What are you using to model

[AJLynn]

That's not so many polys. Are you using instances? (You should be.) Did you set your viewports to a simple display mode? How much RAM do you have and in Windows Task Manager, how much free physical RAM is there and how much is C4D taking? Are you trying to use GI? I see you've got a fakeiosity rig (is it the one Strat posted a while back?) What are those trees done with?

[ZFact]

wouldnt mind getting my hands on strats fakosity rig!!

Could you put me in the right direction Andrew

[AJLynn]

I can't seem to find it. But I can describe it. There was a sun, which is a target infinite light with hard shadows and a slight yellowish color. There were three rings of maybe a dozen lights each, with values turned down, pointing in from a distance, all spots with a pretty wide angle, one high, one a bit above ground, and one below ground, all with soft shadows, and blue color that is deeper in the high ring and less in the lower ones. The ground plane needs a compositing tag to not cast shadows.

 

The reason I asked was that the lights in the last image looked like the lights in that rig, but I've seen the idea described elsewhere. The concept is that the multitude of lights simulates a sky and gets a good effect for exteriors without calculating GI.

 

(That was you, Strat, right?)

[Frosty]

That was my rig (based on Delfoz's work). Search the forum as I posted a zip file. You describe the methodology very well. The rings cast soft shadows (ambient light) the sun casts hard or area shadows.

 

1) As AJ stated...use instances. I see about 4 different itterations of architectural form - there is no real need to duplicate the geometry.

2) 150k polys is nothing. I've broken 1million on a number of occations. Keep your viewport optomized as AJ has stated. Wireframe when you need to and turn off the light.

3) The fakiosity rig will render MUCH faster than GI and with a little post, it looks almost as good. I also prefer it for flexibility. I find it much easier to tweak lights for mood with such a system.

[AJLynn]

Sorry. I misremembered which Steve it was. Not meaning any offense.

 

Steve does a damn fine light rig.

[justintime1]

Hi folks

 

Phew I’v got a lot to get me head round here. Thanks very much for the suggestions.

 

I’m using cinema 4d R9, I’m running 2 gig of ram and duel 3.2G processors. Which should be more than enough id have imagined.

 

I rarely work on jobs of such size and running into this memory issue has really crippled my progress on this job.

 

The lighting rig was sourced on here but I’m sorry I cant recall who posted it. ( it is a very fine rig) And yep I have used instances where possible. Iv striped the models down to the minimum I felt I could get away with and I have my view ports on the most basic settings. Yet still I cant get a test render without a ‘not enough memory’ error coming up.

 

Sometimes if I shut cinema down and start it up again it will alow me to, yet there is more detail needed in the model and it’s a little impractical to continue shutting down cinema every time I need to take a test render.

 

I don’t know if it may be the materials iv used or the method iv used to model the seen. One suggestion was that 40mb file size was quite big for a model of only 170997 polys. Can any one sugest why this might be ..??

 

I have just removed certain metallic and glass textures form the model and things seam to be a little more wiling, could the presence of complex textures be the problem ?

 

-

Oh and the trees are part of a bundle called VB VISUAL , bit of a con really. the advertisement states 200 different objects, in reality it comprises of about 30 different types of plants and trees verifying in size and ‘age’. ( trees of the same species at different ages,) iv only been able to use a small percentage of the models.

 

Finding a good plant and tree bundle of European species was tricky.

 

 

Many thanks for the advice thus far. Any more suggestions are very welcome.

 

Matty

[justintime1]

Here is the lighting rig in question ,

 

Matty

[STRAT]

little c4d fakiosity tip -

 

medium lit, soft shadow casting omnis, with ambient only applied. no huge lighting rigs needed

[AJLynn]

Maybe you need to do this in parts. You could take one camera view, do the parts in the back and save a Photoshop file with layers, the parts in the middle, etc, then comp them together in Photoshop.

[Frosty]

In my experience, C4D files are approx. 10MB/100k polys. So my largest files of around 1,000,000 polys were in the area of 100MB. You're 170k poly model should be around 20MB....but you're saying its 40MB. This leads me to believe one of two things.

1) There is something wrong with your file. I have no idea what.

2) There are a bunch of parametric objects in your file which are not being reported in the poly count. This could be any kind of sweep or loft.

 

I'm thinking its #2. To speed up your display, set the dipslay resolution on these objects to low. For rendering them, reduce the number of facets. For example, a handrail doesn't need a 32 segmented sweep when being viewed from a distance - set it 8. Bottom line is that your model has to be optomized for each rendring.

 

In regards to the trees...I also use that package although I purchased from Maxon. I find they work very well and the render hit is very small.

[manta]

Have you considered going 64 bit, it seems this is just the situation for it, I mean to tell the truth I'm a little envious, I'm still waiting for Max to go 64 bit, however it is nice that it doesn't crash at 1.86GB anymore, now it goes all the way to 3.4GB before crashing, since swithing to Windows X64...

[STRAT]

i'm running c4d and windows in plain old 32bit, but on a new 64 bit machine at home here. runs like a dream. memory management is superb. much smoother than my 32 bit xeons in work.

 

64 bit c4d running on a 64 bit windows and a 64 bit machine is around 30% faster, and even more smoother and stable.