Reducing polygons on branches - Bark material - Dusk/Night Render Settings

[Micha_cg]

I use a i7 920 @3.4GHz and I'm happy. I installed 12 GB RAM, but never needed it for a single rhino task. If you are using linked blocks, you can test different level of low polygon models, if you change the link. You must leave the NURBS way and work with mesh objects, that save a lot of RAM. Try to get the lowest polycount.

How high is your polycount of the scene with blocks? (use polycount tool at my toolbar thread, if you need a tool to count the polygons)

[ledisnomad]

Nelsta21, I'm just curious, what are these renderings for? Are they of the whole tree, details of a branch, or both? I ask because seeing your foliage and branch for the first time, it seems like overkill for a full-tree rendering. For instance, the stems on the foliage are circular and each leaf's stem merges smoothly into the stem. That's a lot of polygons. What if the stem was only octagonal? Or twelve sided? Do you need the leaf's stem to have that little bump as it joins the stem? On the branch rendering, I don't read that little bump at all and I imagine 8-12 sides on your stem would look just as circular as a higher polygon at the branch level. Once you zoom out to the whole tree, you'll never see any of that. If you are showing this at multiple scales, you could model multiple levels of detail: for the 3 leaves, a low-, medium-, and high-poly model block. Then the branch could have two levels of detail. If everything is linked together, you could have each on a different layer and turn them on or off for near or far renderings.

Also, since the leaf has such a smooth edge shape, the mesh must get quite dense. If you used a rectangular shape (and it could still be warped/bent), you could use a clipping mask to render it. The you'd have a much lower-poly mesh.