working with large scenes

[steveblake]

Here at work were pushing some fairly large scenes through max, yet I'm a little confused because I've seen bigger scenes rendered (in terms of data sets). The thing is we're finding the number of layers, viewports navigation and data management unweildly in terms of sheer weight of geometry.

 

I'm just wondering, has anyone got any advice, workflows or tips for working with larger scenes like this? I guess for a start I can imagine we could harness the power of Xrefs, work more with proxies, displacements and lo-res/hi-res object swapping..

 

...am I getting warm?

[martin walker]

have you collapsed all your stacks ?

 

is your geometry as efficient as can be (welded vertices etc)

 

are you textures in a tidy path (not pulled in from all over your network)

 

are you textures a decent size (ie NOT a 2000 * 2000 px bitmap for the tiniest detail)

 

can you optimise any geometry ?

 

just some starter points.

 

 

Personally I dont bother with layers / x-refs..... I just keep it all in one scene and try and be as efficient as possible with my geometry and "group" things for easy managanility...but thats just me

[klaas nienhuis]

collapsing many objects into one will also help a lot.

 

Personally i work with xrefs. not so much to cut rendertimes, because as far is i know they don't. i use them to keep my scenes organized and my viewport as empty as possible by turning them on or off.

I tend to have one file called the mother file. this file contains only the camera, lighting and rendersettings and all the xreffed scenes you need. the xrefs contain the geometry, no lights or camera's.

using this system, you can model in small files (the xrefs) with an entire team (everyone his own xref) and monitor the progress in the motherfile.

 

Klaas

[david.jones]

Another tip i remember reading somewhere recently is that a large number of seperate objects uses up more memory than one editable poly containing all the same geometry.

Try collapsing all geometry and attaching all individual elements into one poly for a logical collection of polys, rather than using groups for example.

[Realmind]

Hi.I think that also we can use 3GB mode in Windows!

[martindrake81]

Hi there

 

I think all the advice so far is spot on.

 

What are you rendering with vray?

 

If so vray proxies for things like cars and planting are a must.

The great thing about these is you can instance them and then also scale them differently.

 

Map sizes should be only as big as they will be in the final render pixel wise.

(some say twice as big)

 

I don't think any of our scenes would render now-a-days without the 3GB switch enabled. If you need links to set this up let me know.

 

Xrefs are a must. (scenes that is, not convices about xref objects yet.)

 

I also turn generate GI off on some objects.

 

Hope this helps