Anima 4D characters, chaos scatter, bloated vrscene files and optimizations for upload

[randy_mills]

I'm hitting a bottleneck in submitting my current workflow that is killing my deadlines at the moment. I have some decent sized archviz scenes in 3ds Max (2024) and am using the latest versions of both VRay (6 update 2) and AXYZ Anima (5.0.2). The scenes, however, aren't insanely big to the point that they should be creating 500+GB .vrscene files! After reading the documentation, I came across this Chaos Cloud Supported Features - V-Ray for 3ds Max - Global Site "Currently, Anima 4D people export to Chaos Cloud Rendering produces large size files and their upload to the cloud might be sluggish." I have a handful of Anima 4d people (10) in my scene and some grass and trees using Chaos Scatter. Is there anything I can do to optimize my scenes further so that they don't take several days to upload to Chaos Cloud? Has anyone been able to rectify this issue? What specifically is causing this? With the subscription model for Anima All I'm unable to export the people out of Anima as a separate .vrscene...I've tried exporting my 3ds Max scene a few different ways, lowering the scattered instances and stripping absolutely everything out of the scene that's unnecessary...still getting 500+GB files which are impossible to upload to the farm to render.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!!! Thanks

[vladimir_krastev]

Hi, thanks for posting. Here is an interesting thread where other users discuss similar issues.
The 4D people are exported for each frame. Try to edit your animation in a way that you don't have too many frames in one shot.
Split the main scene into smaller scenes for each corresponding camera/shot.

[randy_mills]

Hey Vladimir, thank you for the response. Thanks for the link to that thread, but I have already explored all of the options mentioned and my client is not happy with the results I'm getting currently with Vantage so I need to render via V-Ray/Chaos Cloud. I've also done as you have mentioned and limited the frames to each shot and broken the shots out into smaller scenes for each corresponding camera/shot. I was able to upload and render a scene with NO Chaos Scatter, but with Anima 4d characters and it seemed to have no issues, so I think the issue at this point lies in Chaos Scatter. How can I get some proper Chaos support for my issue? I reported via Chaos Cloud this morning after waiting 3 days for my 500GB file to upload, only to have it not render (each sample frame has currently been processing for over 2 hrs and the frames render locally on my machine at 15min/ea.). I have a client delivery for this coming next week and would love to get this sorted ASAP.

Thanks again for your help and I welcome all additional suggestions on how to work around this issue. I'm currently exploring 2 other ideas. 1) render the Anima 4d people out separately and comp them in (lots of comp work, but may be necessary and I'm not sure at this point the Anima 4d people are the issue). 2) replace Chaos Scatter in my scene with Forest Pro.

[randy_mills]

Ok, so it doesn't look like it's actually the Anima 4d people causing this issue. I exported my scene with the Anima 4d people ONLY and it completes the vrscene export at 5GB (still large for only having >12 animated characters in my scene), but it exports quickly and renders quickly locally. I then cleared nearly everything out of the scene and did a Chaos Scatter ONLY vrscene export and stopped it about 20% into the process at ~10GB. So it appears that Chaos Scatter is causing this issue for me. I've read all of the documentation and not sure what's going on. I've made sure I'm not using Camera Culling and most of the settings are at default for my Scatter objects. It's not an overly complicated scene, it has some grass, trees and a mix of flowers in several different scatter objects and they have some splines excluding certain areas. The scatter objects aren't animated, but I do have "Avoid collisions" enabled for my tree scatter and "Temporal consistency" enabled with "Rest-pose frame: 1".

If anyone has any suggestions it would be welcome. This is my first time working with Chaos Scatter and uploading to Chaos Cloud. Thanks!

[randy_mills]

I did learn a trick in the meantime. If you are getting really bloated Anima 4d scenes, you can lower the resolution to something like 16 pixels by 9 pixels (16 x 9 for 16:9 format) and export your vrscene with those settings and it will create a MUCH SMALLER vrscene to upload. Once uploaded to Chaos Cloud you can clone and adjust your resolution settings to the intended settings.

[randy_mills]

It was Chaos Scatter that seemed to be the culprit. After purchasing ForestPro and redoing my scatters, it seems to be exporting the vrscene at a reasonable size. It wasn't the Anima 4d people, those seem to be exporting reasonably well currently. Will continue to update this thread as I rebuild and render my shots, though, in case anything comes up.

[vladimir_krastev]

Hi again and thanks for completing and sharing the extensive troubleshooting you've done. We were not available during the weekend and this is why your request got unanswered.

I was able to upload and render a scene with NO Chaos Scatter, but with Anima 4d characters and it seemed to have no issues, so I think the issue at this point lies in Chaos Scatter.

On the cloud your frames failed because the memory was not enough. It does not look like a Cloud issue.
Everything points to a problem with the Scatter. Would you agree to send us a scene so we could investigate? Try to simplify it if you can but make sure it still reproduces the issue.
Please use the ticket that you have already opened for this task. I will update you there as well.

[randy_mills]

Thanks Vlad, I will see if I can strip a scene down and reproduce the issue tonight so I can share a file with you guys. It'd be great to either a) know what I was doing wrong with Chaos Scatter (since doing the same thing in Forest Pack seems to work without issue) or b) get a resolution on the software side for Chaos Scatter to work in the future. Appreciate the follow up and will share a scene as soon as I can via the support portal.