Opacity Map support?

[Stefan_Laub]

@ Lele: "Technically, you can.
Just as you can model individual leaves on trees, and exact, complex cutout shapes."

Lele i do archviz since 1997, and believe me no 3d app can cope with the amount of modelled mesh holes in any real world scene
vray or lavina might be able to render it, but the host app dies long before and gets unusable due the size and speed of the model then.
it cant be done was meant as "it cant be used in production scenes", there is simply not a time for such a thing as archviz is always within short time frames.

this is also about work flow, which should be easy, and as far i understand it should be compatible to vray scenes.

anyway as said here and on linked in, love the start of lavina, it feels great, i am looking for forward to it, and hope opacity cutout maps will make it in somehow in future.

[charlyxxx]

How did you pack 135mil poly into 3GB?
A 25mil poly terrain is 1.5GB as vrmesh (identical to vrscene for size.).
Are you sure that file is fine?
F.e., does it load back into max?

Hi, ^Lele^

I don't know =) I'm not a technical artist =) I just click on "Export to .vrscene and get this file"

This is a test video with this file -> https://youtu.be/H2CjRhuFtsc

This is another video with .vrscene import to 3ds Max - https://youtu.be/EIP7fy6iskc

As you can see - 3ds Max + V-Ray can read this file =)

In the video Charly posted his file is ~3GB, which sounds unfeasible, as it ought to be around 7.5GB instead.

I created this terrain in World Creator 2. Not in Houdini. With many filters.

Also, loading the file here is taking several minutes, and this all before the VRAM is occupied, it's all two-core CPU action and System RAM, so the video posted by Charly couldn't have possibly gone out of VRAM in such a short time.

But this is no a fake =) I really recorded this video =) This is not a AI recording =) ahhaha =)

I maintain this isn't a memory error due to polycount, irrespective of Lavina having the proper checks in place.

Ok we should check this. What I can do?

Charly, could you maybe share the scene file in question?

Yes, I can.

Here is a link to it -> http://bit.ly/2P1jQuY

When you will download it. Let me know.

I will log an issue to improve the loading of very large meshes, like your terrain example.
We would need to split the mesh into smaller ones and make sure that the acceleration structure for each one is compacted before we start building the next one.
This will reduce the memory spike while loading, and hopefully get you ~15 million triangles per 1 GB.

Hi vladimir.nedev


Thank you very much for this detailed answer.

From what I've heard from Vlado, V-Ray would also render faster if you use actual geometry for the leaves instead of using opacity maps.

So, as I understand, render trees with triangulated leaves in 3ds Max is better too? =) And in Maya and etc.. with V-Ray.

Thank you and have a great day.

Best regards,
Andrew

[npg]

I opened the .dmp file Andrew shared. The crash happened while processing a viewport mouse wheel event. I was able to easily reproduce it by loading a large scene and scrolling the mouse. We will fix this.

[charlyxxx]

I opened the .dmp file Andrew shared. The crash happened while processing a viewport mouse wheel event. I was able to easily reproduce it by loading a large scene and scrolling the mouse. We will fix this.

Hi, npg

Awesome. Thank you!

Best regards,
Andrew.

[vladimir.nedev]

When you will download it. Let me know.

I downloaded the scene, thank you.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[Phillip Miller]

Just a reminder to everyone, that instancing is free in terms of memory - so make sure to instance when you can. In the case of trees, you want to instance at the tree level and not at the leaf/branch level - and when you do that, you can have a forest for the cost of 1 tree.

[vladimir.nedev]

so if that tool is meant to be also used for architectural rendering, support for opacity woudl be very important, even if this is a small speedhi t(maybe with the way vray uses it, stochatic mode etc)

Unfortunately the speed hit won't be "small".
However, we understand this is an important feature, so we will provide an option to enable "clip" opacity at least, which is the cheapest form.
The opacity map however will be limited to simple bitmaps, no procedural textures will be allowed.

Here are two quick tests from today, 45 FPS with opacity, 76 FPS without opacity.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[^Lele^]

That's with clip opacity?

[vladimir.nedev]

That's with clip opacity?

Yes, it's using clip opacity.

[^Lele^]

Thanks a lot!

[cnd7jones]

When can we try out the build with the clip opacity?

[vladimir.nedev]

We will release a new build in March, the clip opacity option will be in it.
Note that the new option is disabled by default, you have to explicitly enable it.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[charlyxxx]

Hi, everyone =)

So, I'm really impressed. This is my test with polygonal leaves. 1 tree - 9 mln polys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26lnLx32K7U

[Phillip Miller]

That's an insane amount of geometry and detail with that level of performance!

[cnd7jones]

whats the proxy file size vs scene file size. wondering how it scales if you had a variety of trees/bushes in your scene that were all modeled vs opacity mapped.