Forest Edge please

[adam_flack]

Hi, firstly thank you for the amazing product. The feedback from clients has been amazing.

We generally work on very large masterplan jobs and the only thing holding us back is Forest Edge. We are currently working on a huge masterplan that's amazing that we can even walk around it in real-time, but it has a number of large park areas and currently with-out Forest edge the grass spills out onto the paths and means we can't use the package for production yet which is a huge shame.

I have done some experimenting and using the standard Forest Pack layered grass 1 large area preset the scene uses 37GB or VRAM, if I switch to the detailed preset of the same type of grass it jumps to 44GB of VRAM but the scene won't always load and when it does there are large black squares over some areas of grass (as seen below).

But again fantastic product and please keep up the great work.

Thanks

[vladimir.nedev]

We generally work on very large masterplan jobs and the only thing holding us back is Forest Edge.

We will try to implement this soon, but we are not sure what the impact will be on memory consumption in a real world scene.
Can you send us an example where you are using lots of Forest Edge ?

I have done some experimenting and using the standard Forest Pack layered grass 1 large area preset the scene uses 37GB or VRAM, if I switch to the detailed preset of the same type of grass it jumps to 44GB of VRAM but the scene won't always load and when it does there are large black squares over some areas of grass (as seen below).

A single mesh instance in Vantage uses ~400 bytes.
There is also a limit of ~16 million instances - this is imposed by the DirectX Raytracing API that we are using.
So the maximum number of instances should be using ~6.4GBs of GPU memory.

When you switch to a detailed preset, does this change the number of instances or just the mesh that's being instanced ?
If it's just the mesh, it shouldn't have this much impact on memory consumption.
Again, a scene we can examine will be helpful.

What GPU are you using by the way ?

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[adam_flack]

Hi Vladimir,

Many thanks for the quick response. I'm just zipping up and uploading the main .vrscene file now but it a 3GB vray scene zipped to 1.6GB so will be a little while. It's a very large development so its a testiment to you guys that it works at all.

I'm surprised I haven't seen the forest edge mentioned more on peoples wish list we use it on every project and it's incredibly helpful on these huge developments. Also I should mention I have tested the bodge where I draw a shape 300mm in from the edge of all the paths and exclude the large grass scatter from this area and then just scattered the detailed mesh inside this close up area but it still used a lot of extra VRAM and when I could get the file to open it had black boxes all over the grass. It's tricky because it takes a couple of hours to save out the .vrscene file so testing is proving time consuming on a live project.

I am using this on an RTX A6000 which we brought to test on these large projects. Below is a grab of what the grass looks like at the edge with the forest edge box left ticked.

I'll send the vrscene file to your email address.

Thanks

Adam

[npg]

We released 1.4.1 today and it adds support for Forest Edge mode. Note that you have to enable opacity rendering (leaf icon) for it to work.

[vladimir.nedev]

Many thanks for the quick response. I'm just zipping up and uploading the main .vrscene file now but it a 3GB vray scene zipped to 1.6GB so will be a little while. It's a very large development so its a testiment to you guys that it works at all.

I never got that scene file from you.

and then just scattered the detailed mesh inside this close up area but it still used a lot of extra VRAM

This doesn't sound normal to me, instances shouldn't be using a lot of VRAM, unless there is a really huge amount of them.

and when I could get the file to open it had black boxes all over the grass.

Maybe you are reaching the limit on the number of instances, we need a scene to investigate.

It's tricky because it takes a couple of hours to save out the .vrscene file so testing is proving time consuming on a live project.

We have long term plans to improve this performance, but it involves changing the vrscene format, the V-Ray Standalone renderer, the V-Ray for 3ds Max exporter and eventually Vantage, so it's tricky.

Even then, the most efficient solution in terms of export/load speed would still be to have our own scattering tool in Vantage that generates the instances on the fly.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[adam_flack]

I've just downloaded 1.41 and opened up a file that I saved out fresh this morning. Whilst the forst edge is loads better than what it was there is still white clumps here and there as can be seen in the attached image below. The top one was from the other day and the bottom is the latest so it's much better than before. It's the only thing that lots of people have picked up on asking what they are and can I get rid of them.

Am I right that the vray car material isn't supported yet, the cars seem to pick up the correct color from the material but there is no reflection just a flat colour (I've attached a grab below)

I'm not sure why you haven't got the .vrscene file I sent it to you on Monday and I have just resent it using the email address vladimir.nedev@chaosgroup.com, maybe it went in your spam folder?

Can I just say this is such a great tool, there are huge teams meetings where whole departments are involved and even the local councils are being involved to try and solve issues in the design and get planning. As long as I can get the file open which I do first thing in the morning there are no crashes and it runs flawlessly. I have found that this file uses 38G Vram and if I have Photoshop or Acrobat open the file won't open, but once the file is open I can use any package I need with multiple versions of Max open and it all runs fine.

[adam_flack]

Apologies, I was too keen to give it a try and forgot to click on the opacity rendering button and it works like a dream now (see below). Massive thank you for gettin this included so quickly.

As I mentioned the only other thing I noticed was the Vray Car material not working but that isnt that noticable compared to the grass.

Thanks again.

[adam_flack]

There is something else that has been commented on by the architects and planning departments. When the camera isnt moving the trees and planting look exactly the same as in the images but when we are moving through the development the trees appear much darker almost as though there is no GI on them then as soon as I stop it's almost instant that all the trees appear brighter and as they would in the CGI's. Its just been a general comment that when we are walking through it gives the impression that some of the spaces are gloomier than what they are. It isn't really an issue as such but I just thought you might find it interesting some of the comments that have been coming in. I have just taken a quick screen capture video below which shows what I mean, hope this helps and an image is attached.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqzxf6WVO6Y

[vladimir.nedev]

Am I right that the vray car material isn't supported yet, the cars seem to pick up the correct color from the material but there is no reflection just a flat colour (I've attached a grab below)

We have some simplified support for it, but it was done before "metalness" and "clear coat" were available in the Vantage rendering core.
Now that we have them, we can probably improve the car paint support somewhat.
We will evaluate how much time it might take and decide whether to do it sooner or later.

I'm not sure why you haven't got the .vrscene file I sent it to you on Monday and I have just resent it using the email address vladimir.nedev@chaosgroup.com, maybe it went in your spam folder?

I got the scene now, thanks.
I am not seeing the black areas in your new renders however.
Have they resolved themselves somehow or maybe they don't happen each time you load the scene ?

When the camera isnt moving the trees and planting look exactly the same as in the images but when we are moving through the development the trees appear much darker almost as though there is no GI on them then as soon as I stop it's almost instant that all the trees appear brighter and as they would in the CGI's.

Maybe you can experiment with switching to the "nVidia AI denoiser", instead of the default "Combined" denoiser.
It still has issues with low sample counts, but maybe (maybe not) you will like the result better in your case.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[vladimir.nedev]

Am I right that the vray car material isn't supported yet, the cars seem to pick up the correct color from the material but there is no reflection just a flat colour (I've attached a grab below)

The build that we released yesterday (version 1.4.2) has improved support for the Car Paint material.
It now uses the metalness and clear coat that we already supported for the V-Ray material and the representation should be much better.
There is still NO support for flakes.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev