Handling Large Scene - gwIvy

[stuartkemp]

Hi Guys,

 

I'm working on a project at the moment which has large areas of wall covered by ivy which have been created with gwIvy and converted to vray proxies. Unfortunately I can't post an image of what I have but it contains 93 seperate ivy proxies which I then xref'd from one single file into my main file in my attempt to keep my scene manageable.

 

Now the issue I am having is that even when isolated, all of this ivy is too heavy to render in one go (low or high res). I keep recieving that bloody 'unloading geometry' message when on the the 1st irradiance map pass however rendering in regions seems to work fine (although render times are still fairly high) but no matter how much I have tried tweaking and optimising my file I just can't seem to crack it.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can work around this either by optimising the ivy I already have somehow or ideas on a ligther and more resource-friendly way on creating ivy on walls (high level of detail is not that important as the ivy is only viewed from a distance)? Infact any ideas stopping short of upgrading my computer would be welcome!

 

I realise I'm probably missing some information needed to assist me so apologies in advance for whatever I've failed to mention.

 

Thanks

 

P.S. No displacement has been used and dynamic memory limit is already set high up at 12000 (already high for my 12gb ram) which has me puzzled as in my experience this has usually been the cause and solution to the whole 'unloading geometry' issue.

[salvador]

What OS are you using? x32 systems can only handle up to 3GB of RAM no matter how much you have. What if you divide your Ivys in a "by area" basis so that you can span all the 93 in groups and in separate files, then x-ref them? This way you can turn off the groups that are not visible to your currrent camera and save render resources.

 

Let me tell you this: AFAIK, it really doesn't matter if they're proxies or not if all 93 are different ivys. But if you created, say 15 ivys and the rest are copies, then it matters and you should always instance your proxies instead of copying them.

[stuartkemp]

What OS are you using? x32 systems can only handle up to 3GB of RAM no matter how much you have. What if you divide your Ivys in a "by area" basis so that you can span all the 93 in groups and in separate files, then x-ref them? This way you can turn off the groups that are not visible to your currrent camera and save render resources.

 

Let me tell you this: AFAIK, it really doesn't matter if they're proxies or not if all 93 are different ivys. But if you created, say 15 ivys and the rest are copies, then it matters and you should always instance your proxies instead of copying them.

 

Hi Salvador,

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

I'm using Windows 7 64-bit with 12gb ram. I have actually split the ivy files into 5 files, by area as you suggested. Apologies as I forgot to mention it. The problem I'm facing is that all ivys are visible in my scene and they are all placed on curved walls so I can not make, for example, 4 or 5 ivys and then instance them as they are all different shapes and sizes. The reason for so many proxy files was as I created them it was taking up so much memory that I had to convert to proxy after creating them, 3 at a time... In reality I actually have over 300 ivys before converted to proxy.

 

Cheers

[Devin Johnston]

Why don't you try and render out the ivy separately in groups that you computer can handle and then composite it all back together later. If your running out of memory I believe this is your only option.

[stuartkemp]

Why don't you try and render out the ivy separately in groups that you computer can handle and then composite it all back together later. If your running out of memory I believe this is your only option.

 

Yeh it did cross my mind but I wasn't really keen on the idea. As it turns out we decided to go in a different direction this afternoon anyways so my walls are now completely covered with plants using forest pack pro.

 

Thanks for the replies though, ill keep your suggestions in mind for future projects.