Rendering passes

[gilpo]

Hi all,

I'm trying to render a VERY large animation. Currently we are at somewhere between 50-100 Million polys. Yes that's Million with an M. The reason I don't know an exact count is that everything in the scene is proxied out. Our clients are picky and like to change things....A LOT! So we are doing several passes to aid in making changes without having to re-render everything.

To aid in my question, here is the scene setup:

Exterior community drive-through.

Pass 1: Buildings and terrain. Everything else hidden.
Pass 2: Landscaping only. Buildings and terrain set to matte.
Pass 3: Props and accessories. (benches, lights, tables, etc) Buildings, terrain and landscaping set to matte.
Pass 4: Animation-moving objects. Everything else set to matte.

Passes 1-3 are rendered with a precalc'd LC+IM.
Pass 4 is processed every frame (duh!)

Pass 1 and 2 precalc'd and rendered without a hitch. Now I'm trying to pre-calc pass 3 and it is failing miserably. I can't even calc the LC because the system runs out of ram - even on 200 subdiv's, single frame. I can't even think about fly-through yet. My system has 4gb of ram. I've tried every memory setting, rendering through backburner, all the usual tricks etc. No dice.

I was under the assumption that with vray mesh, any size scene was possible to render and, like I stated earlier, EVERYTHING in the scene has been converted to vraymesh.

Please, if anyone has ANY ideas on how I might be able to get this animation rendered, PLEASE, don't hesitate to suggest it. Also, if more info is needed, please ask.

Deadline is approaching and I'm freaking out and about to have an anxiety attack....

Thanks so much in advance,
Matt

[RErender]

I usually break up a scene into the same basic categories that you have laid out but then take it further by breaking each of those into as many as 3 sub layers, basically mid, fore and back. I like to break them up where they make sense and save matting/layering issues such as one side of a street or the other etc.

[CXStudios]

Not that it will be fun, but can you break Pass 3 down any more. Such as objects that will be in foreground most of the time be Pass 3A, and objects in the background most of the time be Pass 3B?

If you're using world settings for the LC, my guess is the size ratio is what's killing it; if it's a whole neighborhood like you said, especially if you have a large sky dome.

As for the 4GB of RAM, I don't know what CPUs and OS you're using, but as far as I know and from experience, due to WinXP, Max cannot utilize passed 3GB (limit of 3GB per process). With our 4GB machines, I have yet to break 3.25GB, and that was really pushing it with multiple programs working on multiple tasks. For Max alone, I have yet to break 2.1GB

EDIT RErender beat me too it.

[jujubee]

Do you have alot of opacity in the third pass? Could these be geometry instead? I havent done passes so I wont give you any advice there. But what I wrote below may help.

Do you have the originals for pass 3 (non proxied), you can try ungrouping everything then select all then run an 'attach selected' (on scriptspot.com) to make one gigantic object to be converted to vrmesh. That script is awesome because it automatically creates submaterials and attaches everything. I haven't tried it on an entire scene but I am curious to see if this would work better than individual proxies. It sure has saved me an enormous amount of time already. May be really worth a quick test.

[dejaVu]

gilpo,
I feel your pain man...
Some suggestions:
1. Assuming that it falls over when you have Landscaping and Buildings and Props all together, try rendering the props without the Buildings & Landscaping as matte first. Then use Scanline renderer to create the matte by rendering Building and Landscaping as black and props as Self Illuminated white. This should give you your alpha channel.

2. Have you tried using Dynamic Memory?

3. You could also try and combine the props in with the building pass instead of splitting them off on their own.

4. Try QMC instead of LC for secondary bounce. For large scenes, I find it is quicker

5. General housekeeping will also help. Attach as many objects as you can.

6. Collapse all modifier stacks.

That's all I can think of for the moment. Good luck with it.

[kwok3d]

Pass 4

if you dont wanna do that, try taking off Gen-GI on these moving obj. I once did that on my moving cars. the shadow of these moving obj became 50% brighter but with a little twick in AE, they look fine on 864x480 dvd output. try it.

>Pass 4 is processed every frame (duh!)