New Project Tips & Advice

[ladislavtakac]

Hello there! lets start with a polite introduction, shall we

My name is Ladislav and Im new to the CG business, but Im completelly blown away by its beauty. I just finished my masters in civil engineering, but Ive always had a weakness for architecture and CG design. For the last 2 and something years, Ive invested most of my free time in studies around CG. My beginnings lay in autocad, than I switched to archicad for the rough 3D model. The viz breakthrough came with Lumion. immediately after that ive found out, that Im not satisfied with the quality of my renders (not even close) and so I pursued the 3Dsmax/Vray business.

And so i end up here, on this wonderful site/forum. I hope you can share some of your time and wisdom and spare a couple of minutes to help me with my 2nd CG project in 3DSmax/Vray, that I hope to use in my humble portfolio. My dream is to become a CG artist, capable of creating photorealistic viz renders. Its a long way, I know that, but Im willing to pursue my goal

 

____________________________________________________________________________

 

In this thread, I will post some random question about my current project , and im confident that this wonderfull community will be able to talk some sense into me.

 

 

My first question would be about the polycount of your bacis 3D model (just the building). Im a bit detail abscessed and I tend to create an "overweight" model. The first project was something like 600k ~ 700k polyes and when I added a scene to it ...my RAM was overunn.

 

My rig :

i5 SB (OC to 4,2) , 8 GB RAM 1600 MHz, GPU GTX 670.

 

The complete scene in 3DSmax was something like 6,6 mil polyes and 7 mil verts (trees and HG foliage...). My system couldent take it yet still the building was only 600k.

 

So the question....what would you recommend as a basic poly-weight for a rough model merged into 3DSmax, if you wanted to add a scene around it, withou causing your computer to start a thermo nuclear reaction? In the first project Ive might have ussed to much displacement in my textures...so the reason for the break down could be that...but Im not sure.

Im still in the first phase of the scene composition and so I would like tokill the problem right in the beginning.

 

Next time...i would like to post a little tutorial on my thinking process, how I plan to create certain things, how I created the basic layout and so forth.....and i would be very grateful for your tips,tricks and insights.

Once again thank you all and lets hope that I can make it throu the whole project without boring you all to death..or get banned for stupidity

Edited July 25, 2013 by ladislavtakac

[notamondayfan]

Poly count isn't really a problem for RAM, you could have 100m polys, but if they are of instanced geometry, then then scene would use less RAM than 1 object with 100m polys.

 

Displacement is a RAM killer, especially 3D displacement. If you can use 2D displacement, or bump.

 

8gb RAM should be sufficient for most scenes, but the price of 16gb is very cheap, so perhaps a wise investment? I use 16gb RAM and have no issues with RAM.

 

PS you can't get banned for stupidity, we've all gotta learn, but please use the search function and google as most questions will have already been asked at least once :-)