Work flow and polygon display

[Rendermedia]

Hi All,

 

I want to steer away from asking the age old question about pushing polygons around, instead i want to ask about workflow,

 

I have been aproached to create animations of a town centre, I am receiving models from architects that are high, and in total without stripping out these models I could well end up with a scene with well over 10 - 15 polygons,

 

no graphics card on the planet is going to help me push that amount, so with regards to workflow are there any documents out there or work arounds, that I can digest,

 

I could turn the object displays to Box's but thats only a short term fix,

 

I am about to go 64 bit on all my hardware as I am currently using Precision 650 workstations Dual 2.65 GHz, 2GB RAM with a Quadro4 900 XGL video card,

 

There must be a definative chart that somone has created, you speak to computer resellers and they all want to sell you QuadroFX4600 video cards,

 

Kind Regards

Mark

[chiquito]

Im sorry, I couldnt follow where you are going.

Are you trying to get a workflow to handle big polygon siezed scenes? modeling optimizing techniques? texturing? baking?

Martin

[Matt McDonald]

you speak to computer resellers and they all want to sell you QuadroFX4600 video cards

 

Anyone telling you that you need to a QuadroFX4600 to push around ten to fifteen polygons is a liar.

 

You must mean 10 to 15 million polygons. I've never seen a chart like you are referring to.

 

I hope that the hardware upgrade is not your only course of action to handle such a big scene and that you intend to take advantage of xref, box mode, and both the optimize and substitute modifier.

 

If you keep your naming clear, and have a plan before you start your workflow shouldn't be too terrible. And this way you won't be up a creek when you are asked to work on a 17 million poly scene.

[Rendermedia]

Hi guys,

 

Thanks for that

 

A workflow for handling large polygon scenes is what is required, yes I will start to use Xref and the likes in 3DS Max, just wondering if there was anything else to bear in mind,

 

I have never had to take on a job that has required a whole town to be visualised before, obviously not all in the scene at once,

 

I do not have any control over the modelling but the architects will supply me interior and extiror decors as separate files, or on separate layers saving me the time to edit all the models,

 

I hate specing up computers as the sales guys hear the word lots of Poly's and push the most high end card they have,

 

being a 1 man show I have other areas to spend 1 - 2k on besides cards and would not part with kind of money without testing the kit first,

 

Xworks interactive will build you a machine and allow you to test it for a week or 2 before deciding, a try before you buy at no cost which I thought was quite good as i dont know of any other company that offers that service.

 

Kind Regards

Mark

[voltaire_ira]

i did render one whole subdivision with 150 houses using 3d trees, 3d cars, 3d rooftiles on all the roofs of the houses, grass displacement and made an animation for that. Though its not compared to a town but initially it wasnt planned to have an animation render, only for stills, so houses were not optimized. but the good thing was, i was using max 9 64bit and xp64. Xref is really a saver. when merged in the scene not as xref, poly count reached 54 million.

 

what i would do once Im done with the site is first place the houses in their lots, group them accoding to their models. select each group one at a time and use "save selected feature" on the file menu and save it on a network drive where my xrefs would be located. then do the same procedure for all other components, like trees, cars, entourage...that way you can load the xrefs as small components that you can manage then you can also disable whatever component you want in the xref dialog box.