Re: massive hair instance render

[Kris Rivel <krisrivel(at)gmail.com>]

Well originally I was using a fast sss shader which looked amazing but applying that to a huge tree with thousands of leaves became an impossible render.  Another problem was that I need geometry with two sides for the sss shader to work properly...can't use a plane so my geometry was quite high as well.  I'm going to be seperating it out into a lot of passes for more control and to keep memory load and render times down.  Thanks for all the tips.

Kris

peter boeykens wrote:

consider cheating?

 

If you say massive, there's probably much visual complexity in the scene.

Turning off certain options might not make a huge visual difference. Benefits can be extreme.

 

eg. turning of shadows on the leaves,

if theres ambocc, do the ambocc without them

use seperate, non-area lights for them.

split into layers

that kind of thing.

 

Its hard to say without knowing all that is going on in the scene,

but complex scenes can require cheats you wouldnt go for in a normal scene.

 

You would spend more time setting up, and less rendering. It might make the difference between getting the shot done or not.

 

I've seen rendertime go from 10 hours/frame to 45 minutes, just by being very selective in what received shadows and not. It was actually on a shot with over 600 trees, all with hair instanced leaves on them.

 

...

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Steven Caron

To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM

Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 11:24 PM

Subject: Re: massive hair instance render

nothing more than your general optimizations...

tweaking your bsp tree to handle a concentration of geometry in one area. try to limit the size of the scene bounding box to that area.

different resolution instance objects with lighter shading networks and swap them out accordingly.

On 5/29/07, Kris Rivel <krisrivel(at)gmail.com> wrote:

I'm building a tree with many extremely photo-realistic leaves on it.
I'm using some SSS shading which looks great but together with massive
leaf instance count, my renders are hitting the roof.  I'm trying to
stick to a 2GB memory limit too which is all thats available on the farm
I will be using.  Just curious if anyone has any tips for handling such
massive hair instance renders.  I still have a lot of tweaking and
optimization to fiddle with but it would be great to know of any other
nice tricks up front that I may not have thought about.  Thanks.

Kris
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