tyFlow - free beta

[super gnu]

Can someone tell me how to render grain example with moblur without eating 15gigs of RAM ? Just imagine, you have 20million of grainy stuff....

im playing round with grains now. it does seem to use quite a lot of ram generally.. im not sure yet how to check how many grains im actually using...

my test is based on the test scene, with all but the torus knot deleted. im playing with the clumping etc.. ive tried reducing the voxel size, as the default is like a pile of marbles. from 2 inches default down to 0.5 inches, ram usage jumps from 5GB up to 64 GB, just to initialize the sim. i backed off to 0.6 inch voxel size, and it uses 32-34 GB for the sim. i added a shape node, set to low detail geosphere, then a mesh operator set to vrayinstance.

im rendering as i sim, with cache disabled to save ram.


with moblur on at defaults it seems to use an extra 12gb of ram to render. seems a bit high for a purely instanced scene with (maybe a few million) 12 odd poly spheres.

ideally id like to model some grains ( and small clusters of grains) to use for rendering, but i guess adding detail and variants to the instancer will bump up rendering ram significantly.

probably bucket renderer and playing with vray settings could bring it down.

from my previous tests in houdini, id say that grain sims absolutely gobble up ram... having said that i think maybe tyflow uses more ram for a given sim than houdini would...

[super gnu]

ok one for the Chaos guys...

according to documentation vrayinstancer is supported on GPU in both 3.6 and NEXT..

however the instanced particles from Tyflow dont render on GPU.


asked Tyson and he replied:


"Unfortunately VRay GPU doesn't seem to support instancing at all. I've tried both in tyFlow and the VRay Instancer sample project that comes shipped with VRay....neither render with VRay GPU.

I haven't asked the VRay devs why, yet....hopefully this issue can be solved in the future."

[^Lele^]

I have no idea about what he tested, or what the state of affairs is with the released versions, but in a current nightly i have zero issues with v-ray instancer, pFlow (or any of the other particle systems in max which support geo instancing), and V-Ray GPU.
Edit: further to this, we should soon get *much* better with instances and memory usage, instancer or not.

[tysonibele]

Hey guys, there was a bug in v0.16005 of tyFlow that was causing a tyCache to render in both instanced mode and mesh mode....so trying to render a cached grain sim would take HUGE amounts of RAM. That's fixed in the latest v0.16007.

As for instancing in VRay GPU...that was tested with 3.6 in 2017 a few weeks ago. The VRay samples and my own code would render as black. Perhaps that is fixed in the most recent builds, so I'll look into it when I get the chance and see what needs to be adjusted in my own code to get it going.