Best Pracitices - for large models

[RTurner]

I am looking for some good advice on how to deal with very large files effectivly in Max. I am getting more and more requests for merchandised grocery store renderings. These get out of control rather quickly. The file I'm working on now has 10,000 objects and 1.2 mil polys and 300 textures. Its rather unstable at the moment. Has anyone compliled a "Best practices" for large scenes?

[Tommy L]

Can you get a bunch of the completed objects into a seperate max file and x-ref? all the stuff on the shelves for instance. Then you can keep them turned off, if you do need them in the scene, you can change them to display as boxes in the x-ref panel. This way, the graphics card will be under much less strain.

You could also use vray proxy, an excellent tool.

[RTurner]

I have started using VRay meshes, they are great....I also name all my objects so I can easily turn off all the merchandice. I also turn off all mappingin the viewports. I have had mixed luck with XRefencing so I have stuck with good naming conventions for now. Some of the big problems are material management, deadlines, memory usage, deadlines, design changes, rendering times, deadlines.....and bad headaches. I belived there was a thread from Brian Smith that made reference to some tutorials by 2 insider regarding large scene managment, but I cant quite find these...

[Vince Paske]

Here's a link to a Chaos forum's thread, though it has more to do with memory usage during rendering:

 

http://new.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=20134&sid=9b7459027cc4c89c04ed1ab92b33dc12

[BrianKitts]

If you know you are going to have a really large scene.... break it up, even if you have to render all the parts together, as long as you stay organized you can xref it all together later.

 

for instance, I have a hospital lobby that started with the shell of the building and the floor through the space. Inside I made separate files out of the welcome desk, auditorium, info desk, and gift shop. That way if you are doing just small renderings of one element you can work in the small file xref in your shell and you are good to go that way

 

You don't have to deal with a heavy model of everything together. Even if it's a large scene the only time you actually have to deal with the whole scene is when have to do a large overall rendering. In which case you take your shell xref in all the pieces, you just have to be careful with your memory on large scenes just like any other scene... that's when you can get a big help from making use of proxies and vrimg.

 

It takes some fore-thought to set it up right, and maintaining how everything fits together..... but it sure beats ending up with a large scene that's impossible to render in.... or worse one that won't render at all.

 

As for materials, be conscience about keeping your material names the same throughout the scenes and make use of a material library for the whole scene. That way if you update a material in a section keep it in the library and when you switch to a different part of the overall scene... you can hit apply library to the whole scene and it will update all your materials for you.

[RTurner]

I'm going to keep a running list for everyone here, keep'em coming.

 

 

Tips for Large scene Managment

 

Make a serarate file for each part and XRef into a master scene. Use proxy objects to ease display burdons.

 

Make use of a material library for the whole scene. That way if you update a material in a section keep it in the library and when you switch to a different part of the overall scene... you can hit apply library to the whole scene and it will update all your materials for you.

 

 

From the Chaos group forum - regarding memory-

 

Usually bitmap textures are the biggest RAM killer, though procedural materials tax the processor a lot more. Geometry is the second culprit.

 

Opacity maps - especially if your trees leaves are opacity mapped.

The render penalty for using opactiy mapped leaves..etc.. can be greatly reduced by turning the filtering in the bitmap properties for the opactiy map to OFF

 

uncompressed image formats are lighter on memory than heavily compressed ones.

[Zdravko Barisic]

... you can hit apply library to the whole scene and it will update all your materials for you.

 

How to apply mat library to whole scene?

[BrianKitts]

.. Update Scene Materials From Library .. see image for button location

[Zdravko Barisic]

thanks man, never noticed that button.

[RTurner]

Thanks Brian, I will definatly start using the apply library technique. I had no idea. This is why I love this forum.....now where is that extend deadline tool?

[BrianKitts]

right next to the quick-convert to night rendering button

[ipxstudios]

I turn off everything that is not in the camera view - that helps especially if there things beyond a wall or object in the camera view.

[RTurner]

Are linear lights Evil? Because after three weeks of optimizing, rescaling textures tweaking memory settings, removing photometric lights, etc.....NOTHING was even close to helping as much as turning off my linear lights. I was in process of splitting my scene up and rendering out each scene to find the problem, when I got to my lights Xref model, this was taking 4 minutes to render, on my 8-core mac it seemed a bit much, so I turned off the linear lights and the rendering time went to 5 sec! Thanks to everyone who has replied here. I am better for it, sorry for the rambling run on sentences but Im so darn excited!

[Zdravko Barisic]

What do you mean by "LINEAR LIGHTS"??

What are the linear lights?