Scene Economy - Looking for things to cut...

[Michael J. Brown]

As the scenes I model grow larger and more complex, I am looking for ways to keep the critical memory-hogging items down - such as polygon counts.

 

Currently I model 95% of my scene objects as solids. I realize this is a rather general question, but what are some common methods I could use to achieve more economical scenes (reduced render time and RAM requirements)?

 

Thanks.

[Aaron2004]

That is a pretty broad question...can you give us an example of a problem scene by posting a picture?

[Michael J. Brown]

Aaron, here's an example. This image took around 48 hours to render (and it's only at 2400x1329). Granted, it was rendered on just a 2.33Ghz Core 2 Duo laptop with 3.25GB Ram, so I can't really expect lightening fast results. But something else is bad is going on with this model to make it bogg down like this. This scene should not have taken more than 4-6 hours...if that.

 

Anyway, here it is.

[Guest percydaman]

there really could be several things causing your slowdown, that might not have anything to do with poly counts. You would really need to include more info.

[Aaron2004]

Are you using VRAY? The visualization insider webinar this past Wednesday went into how 'Dynamic memory limit' and 'max tree depth' in your VRAY System settings could really bog down your scene.

 

All that to say that your problem could be originating in multiple areas.

 

How many lights are in the scene?

[Guest nazcaLine]

in one of his articles, ted boardman said that by being modelling efficient, it would be like having a new machine.

one of the things i learned is to be as polygon-economic as i can. one thing is using the interpolation in the splines, default 6 is sometimes too much. when doing columns, many people make a cylinder and leave the height segments at default 5. this is not necesary if your column is straight. just imagine:let's say the column has 24 sides, then 24x5=120, 96 unecessary poligons. now multiply for a 100-column building...you do the math. i've found many times furniture very good medeled but with a huge amount of unecessary polygons. i had to redo the piece completely: a chandelier of 250000 faces to a 2500 faces. i had to redo a whole goddamn scene with classic furniture. it wouldn't render, as simple as that, the program crashed. after the remodeling, it took less than half an hour. and finally, the main advice to be polycount efficient is modelling in max, since you can control the number of poly detail you put to a model. when you import geometry from cad, you can't comtrol the number of faces it generates.

well you get the idea. look for ted boardman's tutorials in this site.

good luck

 

Eduardo

[Michael J. Brown]

I'm using Mental Ray. 187 lights (60 Ray Traced, remainder Shadow Mapped) + Daylight System

 

I havne't skinnied-down my poly counts at all, so i'm sure that is having a big impact (table cloths, chairs and booths). However, the scene I posted (the 43-hour one) is one of the quickest to render. I've been trying for the past week and a half to render another shot that doesn't even have a line of sight to the high poly count table cloths, chairs and booths. Not to mention, I have those items turned off for the camera I'm trying to render right now, and it does not speed anything up. I've also reduced the resolution of all my custom material maps to below 800kb each (down from around 5mb ea). and still having extremely slow render times.

 

But, I'll go through and run the optimize modifier on every object that can't be simplyfied any other way and see if that helps any.