Matt Sugden Posted September 29, 2011 Share Posted September 29, 2011 I'm about to put together an animation of a large site, and once again my downfall is 3D trees. Every time I have attempted an animation using some form of 3D tree I start running into serious memory issues, and usually have to abandon the 3d approach or try something else. I'm using vray and proxies, and very low poly trees (max 1000 polys) I gotta say I'm getting very frustrated with this as I have a very pressing deadline. Is it just a case that you need tonnes and tonnes of memory to deal with trees or if there something I'm missing. I know using opacity maps can be a killer, but when you're using low poly trees there is little alternative. I'm using the vray material wrapper to try and help this. Is it better just to not use, opacity maps at all, is vray just better at just dealing with large volumes of poly's? I appreciate that main workstation is not the latest spec, but it is no slouch either, it has 3gb of memory and a Q6600 quad core cpu. Most of my render farm is i7. So if I can get it working on my workstation I should be home free on my render nodes. Help!!!! I need some ideas super quick! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
frog_a_lot Posted September 29, 2011 Share Posted September 29, 2011 We use MultiScatter and Vray proxies and seems to work fine, and that's not even with i7s Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Buckley Posted September 29, 2011 Share Posted September 29, 2011 Hi Matt 3GB really isn't much these days. Do you have the ability to upgrade to say 6 or 8GB? 3D trees are always a nightmare if you don't have enough memory regardless of whether you are using proxies or not, they still get loaded into memory at rendertime. What's the memory on your farm like? Also how are you rendering to the farm? Is there an option to use and 3rd Party Render Farm like Rendernation for example? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Sugden Posted September 29, 2011 Author Share Posted September 29, 2011 Upgrading is a can of worms. Antiquated as it may sound, my farm is all on XP, so to upgrade I'd presumably need about 8 copies of Win7, plus 64bit versions of all my software and also the memory itself of course. It's a job which definitely needs doing sure, but not this week, and not on this project, the deadline wont permit it. Any other ideas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Buckley Posted September 29, 2011 Share Posted September 29, 2011 Ok so all your machines are 32-bit, which is where the problem lies. So ... is an third party renderfarm out of the question? How many frames is it? How long do you reckon it would take to render one frame if it actually rendered? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt McDonald Posted September 29, 2011 Share Posted September 29, 2011 I agree with the others. You don't have a lot of memory to work with. My 32 bit memory is a bit foggy but you might look into the 3Gb switch. As I recall, without it, any one program can only use 2Gb of RAM (and in reality less). With the 3Gb switch, a program can use up to 3... Regarding the opacity maps, turn off bitmap blurring on the opacity map only (leave the diffuse as is). This will speed up render time significantly, though I don't think it affects memory usage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Sugden Posted September 30, 2011 Author Share Posted September 30, 2011 So, assuming I dont have time to overhaul my render farm this week (which I havn't) what are my options? People were rendering trees 5-10 years ago, should I be thinking about using scanline and compositing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Buckley Posted September 30, 2011 Share Posted September 30, 2011 Weren't people using RPC and Billboard trees 5-10 years ago? How close are you going to get to them? I'm not so sure scanline would make much difference, but rendering the trees separately might help as you suggested. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt McDonald Posted September 30, 2011 Share Posted September 30, 2011 I would think that you'll have more memory problems with scanline as v-ray is pretty good at memory flushing. You might have to turn off some of the bells and whistles though. And billboards aren't a bad idea. But, look into that 3Gb switch. It takes all of 5 minutes to implement on each machine and should get you another gig of RAM. If you had time to switch your scene from V-Ray to scanline, you have time to roll out the 3Gb switch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cgrant3d Posted September 30, 2011 Share Posted September 30, 2011 Something else that helps when in 32 bit is to not use the VFB because you'd be surprised how much memory it takes with all the render elements. Those of us on 64bit forget about those hundreds of megs / gig+ memory that can easily be taken up by render elements. The basic workflow is for your final image (that you're running out of memory on) save as raw .vrimg file then use the vray command line tool to convert it to an exr w/all elements after the render (outside of Max). The key to reducing the memory footprint with this technique is to set your max resolution to something really small (ie 640x480 or even 64x48, etc) then in the Vray Framebuffer rollout disable "get resolution from max" and enter your final image resolution here. now make sure to enable "render to vray raw" and disable "save separate render channels" ... now when vray renders it will only use enough memory for a 64x48 framebuffer not the full size one you'd normally use (ie 6000x4000, etc). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
creasia Posted September 30, 2011 Share Posted September 30, 2011 (edited) I just had this problem myself. It seems like a commercial solution is the best. I am converting satelight imagery to proxy vegitation, so I was looking for a scatter method that used grayscale maps to distribute the trees. I just bought the latest 64 bit 6 core intel machine with 2 GB video memory and 12 Gigs of ram. The best free method I could find was using partacle flow and an instance coverter script from Bobo. This method was still bringing my computer to its knees after exceeding 200,000 mr proxy trees. I caved in and finally bought Carbonscatter which has free render nodes. The UI was a bit hard to figure out at first, but I was able to find some Vue tutorials which used the same UI and mapping techniques. Carbonscatter recognizes easynat trees which come on the 2011 DVD or can be downloaded for free. Good Luck. Edited September 30, 2011 by creasia Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Sugden Posted October 2, 2011 Author Share Posted October 2, 2011 I agree with the others. You don't have a lot of memory to work with. My 32 bit memory is a bit foggy but you might look into the 3Gb switch. As I recall, without it, any one program can only use 2Gb of RAM (and in reality less). With the 3Gb switch, a program can use up to 3... Regarding the opacity maps, turn off bitmap blurring on the opacity map only (leave the diffuse as is). This will speed up render time significantly, though I don't think it affects memory usage. Well to my surprise, I actually thought I'd already done this, but it would appear not, and it has definitely helped. At least so far my test render is completing without crashing. Not sure I've seen any benefit from reducing the blurring yet though. But I'll keep on testing. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Sugden Posted October 4, 2011 Author Share Posted October 4, 2011 ah, bit of an issue with the 3gb switch, seems my video drivers don't like it much, they are not loading on reboot. Anyone know a quick work around? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt McDonald Posted October 4, 2011 Share Posted October 4, 2011 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319043 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Schroeder Posted October 4, 2011 Share Posted October 4, 2011 Back in the day we used to render literal forests of trees using Vray proxies and 3 gigs of RAM. Throwing more memory at it may not solve the core issue. I mean, 64 bit is not that old. Have we all forgotten how we worked in 32 bit? However, we had to use composting to really make it render quicker. I'm not sure if you mentioned it, but are you breaking your landscape into a separate pass? If not, try that. If that doesn't work, try breaking your landscape up into 2 passes. For example, foreground and background landscape. Yeah, it's not the prettiest way to work but it works in a pinch. Also, just as a reminder, make sure your proxies are instanced and not copies. You'll also want to increase the amount of RAM that vray uses from 400mb to 2 gigs and that'll help how vray caches proxies in your memory on render time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Sugden Posted October 5, 2011 Author Share Posted October 5, 2011 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319043 This suggests that only SP1 has these issues and the fix is to install more recent updates? Well I'm on SP3 and still getting the issues. Any ideas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Sugden Posted November 11, 2011 Author Share Posted November 11, 2011 Just to dredge up an old thread, I have a bit of breathing space now and I'm contemplating upgrading the OS and therefore my RAM on all my machines. If I'm wanting to have pain free rendering of lots of foliage what's the minimum I want to be considering. I was thinking 16GB across all my machines, but beyond that it's starting to get a bit pricey? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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