3D software which handles easily several million polygons in viewport

[branskyj]

Hi all,

Recently I was given an assignment to create an ocean animation. I am using the Houdini Ocean Toolkit for the water surface and the plugin is doing an awesome job but is absolutely dependent on the segment count of the plane object representing the see water (more polygons- more detail in the waves).

 

My weapon of choice is 3DS Max (with all the latest service packs installed) and a big problem so far is:

1. When creating massive plane object for the water the default segment count maxes out at 1000x1000 and I need more especially for the desired size 600m/600meters. When I create more segments (via Edit Poly-Connect) 3DS Max is taking FOREVER to select the many edges when connecting. It is almost insane. I tried Max 2013 and 2014 at the office and there is no real speed improvement in 2014.

 

Now, my gripe is not with the view port performance/lag (which is to be expected) but with the above subdividing of the water surface speed.

As far as I know 3DS Max is not multithread and probably for that reason it takes forever to accomplish the task.

 

My question is- is there another software which will allow me to create custom shapes with very large number of segments with ease?

 

Thanks you very much.

[Jose Negrete]

if its a square plane, why not add a turbosmooth modifier then collapse it?

[branskyj]

Thank you so much, Jose. I should have thought of that myself but...

It is a bit tricky when trying to create surfaces with unevenly distributed edges (there is a ship in my scene and I want where the ship sits the water to have nicely defined waves and further away from the ship to have less definition) but your idea is a huge time saver.

Thank you and have a nice weekend.

[Jose Negrete]

Hmm, not sure if it will work but what if you make a square selection where you want more detail and use the MSmooth tool under edit geometry?

[Corey Beaulieu]

Are you using VRAY?

 

A Vray displacement would do this on a simple plane. Just use the 2D mapping and up the subdivs on the map. Vray will adaptively reduce the amount of effect as the texture moves away from the camera.

[Nicolai Bongard]

My suggestion would pretty much be as mentioned above. Create your sea plane and give it some segments (the amount of segments that would be fitting for the sea the furthest away from the camera. Then apply an edit poly poly modifer and select a new smaller area, where you will get double the amount of vertexes/polys, then apply a tesselate modifier. Add an edit poly modifier, select an even smaller area, apply tesselate... Repeat as necessary. Then when you have the required polygons, either add an edit poly and select nothing, then apply a noise modifier and set it to the z axis, or you can add an edit poly with a soft selection before the noise modifier so that the sea does not move as much further away from the camera, making it easyer to "fade" it into the horizon. The advantage of this is that you can turn off the modifiers in the stack in case your scene gets really heavy, and it should also use less ram when rendering than the vray displacement method i think.

[branskyj]

Thanks a lot for the help, guys. All good suggestions.

For now the problem is solved, but will give the other ideas a try at home just to maybe refine the process.

 

Cheers.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I haven't used it in 10 years but I was impressed but Lightwaves ability at that time to handle large polygon sets. It still holds a warm place in my heart because of that.