Proxy Trees Poly Count

[LukeC]

Hi guys, I just want to do a little bit of a survey here. I'm working on a detailed exterior animation that will contain a large number of trees (approx 10 000).

 

There is a bit of debate in the team as to what is a good poly count for a tree. There will probably be 7 or so different types of trees, so 7 different proxies.

 

Basically I'm curious as to what other peoples think is a good poly count for a proxy tree and their experiences with using them in large scale animations.

 

Cheers

Luke

[lambros]

One of my current projects has about 1000 proxy trees. There are 5 different kind of trees that range from 40 to 100K polygons each. I have had no real problem rendering them (with 64bit OS, 8GB ram), but I decided to drop the translucent leaf materials which I planned to do to reduce render times. Otherwise, vray did not complain at all. To avoid flickering as much as I could, I used a medium settings IR map along with adaptive DMC image sampler. 10K tree proxies are a lot more, but I think that vray will behave fine

[kjverine]

One of my current projects has about 1000 proxy trees. There are 5 different kind of trees that range from 40 to 100K polygons each. I have had no real problem rendering them (with 64bit OS, 8GB ram), but I decided to drop the translucent leaf materials which I planned to do to reduce render times. Otherwise, vray did not complain at all. To avoid flickering as much as I could, I used a medium settings IR map along with adaptive DMC image sampler. 10K tree proxies are a lot more, but I think that vray will behave fine

 

Translucent leaves add more rendertime in vray??? What about opacity maps do they add alot of time??? I have some trees by xfrog and they use opacity maps for their trees. Is it wise to use them?

[Dave Oliver]

i think..... opacity maps will not affect translucency at all. translucency only means the blurring of light coming through an object not the perfectly glossy 'see-through' effect.

 

if you have the translucency enabled in vray it adds a bunch of time and memory and you will only notice it if you are looking up through the trees at a bright sky, not down at the dark ground.

[BrianKitts]

Think of it this way.... if an object is opaque the render engine only has to do calculations for the light bouncing off the object. If it's translucent light has to be calculated for emissions through and off the object doubling the calculation required for one object. Give yourself a 10k poly tree of leaves and you can see how it will slow down the engine.

[LukeC]

I should have mentioned my trees have no opacity or translucency on the leaves. In my previous experience I've done all my animations with trees approx 10 - 50k, and for this particular job I'm using 10k poly trees. My point in starting the thread was to get an unbiased opinion as to what other people tended to use or believe was a suitable poly count because I have people that believe that was too much, and for my own record i wanted to see what other people did.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Typically I use 250k to 350k for Onyx trees if they are within 50 feet of the camera. Otherwise I am not satisfied with the way they look. I think you need to look at your animation path, and anything in the distance can be a 10k'er, but anything closer, I would go higher.

 

Yes, opacity mapping can bring a GI engine to a slow crawl. I think it has to do with the edges of the leaves, where it isn't white or black, but varying shades of gray. I know people have worked around this using less blur and different filter types. it might also be worth trying a 2bit opacity map so everything is either black or white.

 

I would say the real answer to your question will be driven by the specs of your renderfarm. It is not difficult to do a quick test, and see what the farm is capable of handling without crashing. Other tips would be to exclude distant trees from reflections, and so on.