Scene efficiency

[Stephen Thomas]

I have always been a bit lax with my scene efficiency in the past and would like to establish a good workflow for future projects.

 

If I were producing a model of a housing estate e.g. with a set number of standard housetypes, what would be the best method for bringing these into the site model to enable fast render times, low file sizes and allow easy changes to the house types?

 

Reference files, instances, vray proxies or a combination of these?

 

I am using 3ds max 9 and vray 1.5 RC3.

 

Any advice greatly appreciated.

[alrawli]

From what ive seen of colleages using V-Ray i reckon proxies would be the way to go to reduce render times, if your using multiple identicle objects in a scene. Ive tried using references and instances in a few pieces of work and the render times havnt changed much if any at all.

[hughie]

A combination of Vray proxies and Instances should do the trick. Not sure if it will bring down the render times by much but certainly help with rendering stability on larger scenes.

If you are looking for ease of changing house types using instances alone would be the way to go.

[tayrona]

Vray proxies + instances, amazing combination... simplify render times and archive management.

[BrianKitts]

I've working on a couple housing developments so here's my 2 cents for what it's worth...

 

but first thing to keep in mind is that proxies and instancing all not direct methods for reducing render times. They are simply methods of memory management. They allow your model to take up less memory therefore allowing more memory to be available for rendering, which can decrease render times but it's at the cost of having proxies in your scene mean that time will be spent by vray loading and unloading geometry into memory thus actually slowing down your render times.

 

That being said proxies are still extremely useful.....in the case of vegetation you would run out of memory if you weren't using them, would have to resort to increased amounts of dynamic memory, and that will just shoot your rendering time right in the foot.

 

As mentioned make heavy use of instancing. A house has many identical windows for instance so make sure you instance one window as much as possible.

 

I would also recommend building all of the houses in seperate models. After all the houses are built, create your street scene with vegetation and all your enterouge and xref all of the houses in place. There are a couple of advantages to this. First one being viewport load, you can leave the visibility of your xref's as either "off" or "show as box" and it won't slow down your viewport when you are working on the street scene. The other large benefit is that if you are working with a team of people it allows people to work on separate files individually xref'd into the same scene makes it easier to work simultaneously on different parts of the project.

 

The last thing I would say is don't over detail your models, if it's not going to be viewed from close don't spend the time doing the detail that you'd never see anyway, and don't waste memory on geometry that is never visible to the camera.... if you never see the back of the house (or one side) don't waste any geometry (memory) or time on it.

 

vray has been previously mentioned in the thread but being that it's in general discussions... I'm not sure if you are using vray, that being said if you are..... then do make use of the proxies, and if all else fails and you get to the end you've got too much stuff in your scene and you can't render without crashing your systems memory..... then turning off the frame buffers and rendering to a vrimg file you will find to be a lifesaver.

 

good luck to ya!

[Stephen Thomas]

I would also recommend building all of the houses in seperate models. After all the houses are built, create your street scene with vegetation and all your enterouge and xref all of the houses in place. There are a couple of advantages to this. First one being viewport load, you can leave the visibility of your xref's as either "off" or "show as box" and it won't slow down your viewport when you are working on the street scene. The other large benefit is that if you are working with a team of people it allows people to work on separate files individually xref'd into the same scene makes it easier to work simultaneously on different parts of the project.

 

Thanks everyone for your responses but this sounds more the route I want to go down. Makes sense to give the house types each their own file. Makes it easier to edit as I can keep them orthogonal rather than trying to edit something which has been rotated and inserted into a site plan.

 

So once I x-ref one copy of the file in I can just instance that throughout the scene? And then when I modify or add to the source file will that update all instances when I open up the site file?

[BrianKitts]

I failed to mention the two types of xrefs....

 

If you want the ability to move the houses around and instance multiple copies of the xref then you need to use "xref object" to place it in the scene. If you want the houses to be placed in specific locations and not move, then you would place the house in the correct place in it's own file that way when you xref it in using "xref scene" it won't move around on you, downside to that method is you can't instance the xref around the scene. That option would be better if you were putting multiple neighborhoods together, whereas "xref object" is better for assembling a single neighborhood.

 

either way yes they will both update if you modify the original file. you can manually force an update to the master scene's xrefs by opening the xref panel selecting your external file and hitting the update button, you don't have to close and reopen the master file as you mentioned....