RAM and Softshadows

[mbr]

I am rendering several animations of an interior condo and I am debating whether or not to upgrade the RAM.

 

My rendering system:

 

Dual 2.2s

768 MB RAM

Quadro 4 700 GXL

 

The Scene:

 

326 Lights, 90% are omnis (yes, I know it could have been done better, this was my first time with a complex interior)

 

250 or so of those are casting soft shadows.

 

It's taking about 3 minutes per frame at 320x240, which is crazy.

 

So my question is, is it worth buying another 512 mbs or so? I believe I'll have to discard one of the 256s, so it would bring it up to 1024. Or should I buy more, or did I just put too many damn lights in there?!

 

Thanks. Oh, I need the all on, too.

[Jennifer]

Hi,

 

That is a lot of lights, especially omnis. Shadow-mapped Omnis need to create shadow maps for all six sides of a cube, which will take a lot of memory. Have you checked your Task Manager and the Performance tab to see how much physical memory is being used? If it's swapping out to the hard drive during rendering then it makes sense to add more memory. It's not that expensive, even if you have to trash old stuff to add more.

 

Are you modeling every light in the building? That is rarely necessary. Having only lights loaded (via XREF) or turned on when needed can help considerably.

 

Three minutes per frame is not extraordinary, depending on the complexity of your scene. How many frames are you rendering?

 

Have fun!

[mbr]

Thanks for the reply.

 

Here are the stats:

 

Physical: 424.6/767

Virtual: 726/1876.1

 

Faces: 1121760

 

I am not sure if that is the entire file or just what is visible. I've got each room grouped and only visible when I will render that room. This is for one of the smaller rooms (the master bedroom and bathroom).

 

The omnis, well, the attentuation stretches across the whole floor plan, so I can't turn them off. Maybe not the best solution, but I liked the softness of the look.

 

As for pricing, it's all RDRAM, so the cheapest I could find was about $500 for 512mbs. That's too much! I could get a new system for under $2k, but I'd rather not, of course.

 

I am trying to learn the best ways to do this quickly. This is the first model of three, the second one is half done and the lights are about 50% less and look better.

 

Thanks again.

[mbr]

Oh, almost forgot, it'll be about 4000 frames per unit.

[Wolf]

Originally posted by mbr:

It's taking about 3 minutes per frame at 320x240, which is crazy.

our render times average 15 mins per frame with some projects double that.

the problem isnt the ram, but how many lights your computer has to calculate, so i dont believe a ram upgrade would give you a significant enough boost in speed.

 

Things to try:

 

1.Give each light attenuation, so it doesnt has to calculate each light past where it ought to cast shadows.

 

2.If your project isnt too complex, you could try and bake the lighting into texture maps,

with max 5's render to texture.

[Jennifer]

Hi,

 

We are usually pretty happy when render times are below 15 minutes. 4000 frames is a lot of frames, though. And how many sequences are you rendering at 4000 frames?

 

It looks like you have some physical memory left, if I'm reading that correctly. I agree with Wolf on the memory and lighting issues. It sounds like you have every omni adding light to the entire scene?

 

The use of far attenuation can significantly cut rendering time, since the renderer can ignore that light for things outside it's range. It's also somewhat closer to how real lights work.

 

Adding another machine is not an unreasonable prospect, especially with the number of frames you are looking at. As Wolf mentioned, max r5's Texture Baking is a great option. Which max version are you using?

[mbr]

I am using 5.1, but I have no idea how to texture bake so that will have to wait.

 

The reason I used the omnis this way was because

I went through a GI/fake tutorial (with the small room and four different walls (separate objects)). He used the far attenuation but only stopped it once it was past the far wall. It makes a huge difference, from my experiments, when you increase the att. So all my lights have far att active, but they cover almost the whole condo.

 

I may have spoken too soon. I have done several tests, and that's where I came out with the higher render times. But, for some reason, I've gone ahead and rendered one of the bedrooms and the times are about 30-60 secs per frame. MUCH better! I am not sure why some of the other times started at several minutes, then went down to less than a minute. I have changed nothing. I am wondering if it is because of an odd object or shape that causes significant calculation increases (not polycount, though, as that is pretty consistent).

 

Here are 2 of the scenes. The 4000 frames or so will be split into about 8 or so animations per unit.

 

The first images, the ones with the sequence, are of the unit I am rendering.

The other ones are of the current unit I am working on, much better, I think.

 

 

 

These will essentially be the second animation I've done for an interior, so a lot has been 'learn as you go'.

 

I'll be posting some in the WIP sometime soon.

 

Thanks for the help and suggestions.

[Jennifer]

It looks nice. There are some definite issues with lighting and shadows, though. For instance, in the last images you can see that the ceiling is brightly illuminated where it meets the wall on the left, yet the wall is not illuminated in the same way. Shadows seem to be missing on a few things here and there, too.

 

The exceptional number of omni's may give a general-illumination feel, but it isn't exactly true to life. Since you have max 5 you could go with a real number of photometric lights, enable the Radiosity system and let that calculate realistic lighting and shadow effects. You can also have it store both the indirect and direct lighting in the mesh, significantly speeding up scanline rendering. It takes a while for it to calculate the radiosity solution, but then you save that time and much much more at rendering time.

[mbr]

Yes, there are certainly some issues. I'll work on that 'glow' by the windows, it may be a little too much, although from the pics that I am studying, there is certain amount of glow that occurs at the ceiling, but not the walls (someone correct me if I am mistaken).

 

My main concern with the more even distribution of light was that the entire unit, closets, bathrooms, etc., will be shown, so it was important to try to light as much as possible at first try as my client continually wanted to see each detail (like toilets).

 

Radiosity was out of the quesiton. From my experience the standard system in Max is not that intuitive nor is it fast (and I have yet to see an animation done with it). I did debate about using Final Render, but given the number of frames (about 16,000 in all), I figured there were too many variables and things that could go wrong. Just too many rooms. I did do a test with fR at the beginning to see and it basically looked the same, shadows and all (a little better, of course).

 

Thanks for the comments.

[Jennifer]

Hi,

 

Being able to see what they are selling is the important thing, of course. You may want to brighten the livingroom up a bit; it seems dim compared with the area behind it.

 

We've done some very nice animations using Lightscape solutions brought into 3ds max. Those parts of the animation render very fast, since the materials and lighting is baked-in to the model. 3ds doesn't have to think at all about the rendering. Of course, it took 30+ hours for the computer to generate the solution, but the rendering was quick, and looked great.

 

Have fun!

[mbr]

I'll have to look into the texture baking in the future. I know Final Render has capabilities similar to what you are describing, but considering what experience and the time frame I needed something I felt at least slightly comfortable with.

It's also just me and my computer so I wanted to avoid and potential problems with GI and the stories I've read about with flickering, etc. There was just too many things to see in these (if it were just a animation of one room, like a lobby, I would have tried the GI method).

 

I appreciate the comments, though, and next time aroudn I will have enough experience (and hopefully more hardware) to do things more 'accurately'.

 

The final project will all be online, and presented in an interactive presentation (all Flash), I'll post it when I get done.

 

 

As for posting images...ha! I had such difficulty doing it at first and it is blatanly simple! You just go to the little blue letters in the left hand corner 'UPLOAD UTILITY', click, follow the directiosn, cut and paste the URL that it will generate, go down to the IMAGE button (below) and past it into the text field. Make sure that there is only one 'http://', preview the post, and make sure that there is a space between the final letters of your url and the [iMAGE] tag (for some reason, my tests kept putting them next to each other and it would not work). Try testing in the area on the forum designated for testing. Good luck.