Polys&proxies; how far can Vray go with a 64 bit OS?

[yyk]

When creating trees (think conifers, not broadleaf) I'm constantly struggling to find a balance between polys and quality and am wondering if I would be wasting money if I was to upgrade to a system that had, for instance 32gigs of RAM (or more, if it would make any difference?) and more modern processors. I currently have a system with dual quad Xeon 5355 & 8 gigs of RAM.

Simply put, would upgrading my system allow me to make vrayproxy forests with the polycount of a single proxy tree at around 2 to 4 million polys, or will there be software limitations? At current my system can't handle this kind of a load.

[duke2]

I'm surprised you can't make a forest with that system! 32gb of ram will definitely increase how many polys you can have, but something sounds off if you're struggling with 8gb.

[^Lele^]

With 7 different types of tree, ranging from 2.5 to 7mil polys each, i populated a displaced landscape for Frantic's Dragonball.
Those were 25 thousand copies.
Of course no landscape only has trees, so i had to add in rocks and dead trees, overall another 30 unique objects, but with much smaller polycounts.
I think i had 5k dead trees, and 50k rocks.
Then, we needed more to be visible, and so replicated the populated landscape 25 times.
That's 5mil polys per tree (on average), times 25.000 times 25: 3.125.000.000.000 polys (guesstimate, ofc. dead trees and rocks aren't taken into account).
They rendered no problem, with and without moblur, on 8gb slaves.
Without moblur, a domelight and a sun, real transparency on leaves and so on, they were rendering at 45mins a frame @ 2k resolution on old-ish (not i7) quad cores.
Use proxies and the dynamic memory limit to go wherever you want with polycounts

[sv]

3.125.000.000.000

what even is that number?

It's pure geek, but I would really like a frame stamp in Vray that does actually return the amount of polys in a scene including all proxys and that... I recently had to do a single wall in a single room that was a concrete cast of a certain household object, repeated massively across the span of the room. A single tiled proxy of this pattern was about 6m polys, and there were 48 tiles making up the wall, thus 288million polys - just for this one wall surface, and there was another wall made of a different surface that was less polys but still an absolute f*ck load - I really wanted to know what I was trying to render, I suppose in case I needed to drop the poly counts for performance reasons.

[^Lele^]

Lol!
three thousand and change Billions, i suppose? :P
Oh, and thank god Vlado implemented the box and point viz modes...
Max wasn't having any fun at all redrawing that stuff...

I agree it'd be lovely if the proxy returned to max its internal polycount, so the hud could take them into account.

[percydaman]

Lol!
three thousand and change Billions, i suppose? :P
Oh, and thank god Vlado implemented the box and point viz modes...
Max wasn't having any fun at all redrawing that stuff...

I agree it'd be lovely if the proxy returned to max its internal polycount, so the hud could take them into account.

I can't fathom what a beast it must have been to work with. Did you xref anything?

[^Lele^]

I did indeed.
Trees, dead trees, and rocks had their own individual scene.
I xrefed those into the terrain, which then became one patch element.
That was xrefed into the actual shot.
Notice i xrefed SCENES, not objects.
That, imho, has been the key to work really quickly within max.
I can tell you that even the simplest of task, with 25k of those proxies, was done trough scripting, as the actual scene file was near impossible to navigate, and the undo system would overflow with the blink of an eye and crash max.
Once they were xrefed in, however, the object count was 0, and max was a happy pup again.

[percydaman]

ya thats what I thought. We use rpmanager here, and I love the deferred xref scene loading it can do.

[yyk]

Thanks for your replies, I need to investigate this a little further.

With 7 different types of tree, ranging from 2.5 to 7mil polys each, i populated a displaced landscape for Frantic's Dragonball.
Those were 25 thousand copies.
Of course no landscape only has trees, so i had to add in rocks and dead trees, overall another 30 unique objects, but with much smaller polycounts.
I think i had 5k dead trees, and 50k rocks.
Then, we needed more to be visible, and so replicated the populated landscape 25 times.
That's 5mil polys per tree (on average), times 25.000 times 25: 3.125.000.000.000 polys (guesstimate, ofc. dead trees and rocks aren't taken into account).
They rendered no problem, with and without moblur, on 8gb slaves.
Without moblur, a domelight and a sun, real transparency on leaves and so on, they were rendering at 45mins a frame @ 2k resolution on old-ish (not i7) quad cores.
Use proxies and the dynamic memory limit to go wherever you want with polycounts

Oh, wow :P I REALLY need to get this to work right.

[jonahhawk]

...three thousand and change Billions...

3 Trillion. (not to change the subject) We in the U.S. are all too familiar with numbers like this. 3 Trillion is one third our national debt.

[3ddesign]

Assuming there was a roll of 3 trillion - $1 dollar bills, it would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out dollar bills behind it, 42 years before it reeled out three trillion dollar bills.

And Vray does it in 45 minutes. Vray rocks.