Replicate Versus Instanciate

[Fermi]

Hi,

Wonder which are the differences of both settings.

Until now I only changed to Instanciate when in my scene I have Important number of poligons that belong to instancied copies of other objects, most times in my case, Geometry trees.

It made sense until today, have a scene, with some 500,000 poligons to which I start placing trees, for noe One single Tree Objects fo some 50,000 poligons, that I instanciate up to 25 times, that would add some 1,200,000 poligons to the scene, but instancied ones.

Ok, I check instanciate in System and render.... system hangs, MEmory usage Ramps up until 1,7 gigs when "Compiling Scene Geometry" .... Ouch!

Change Back to Replicate, and scene renders strait, only uses some 800 Mb of RAM... My problem is that I only started adding Foliage... Oh my...!

Only thing, scene has also a large surface with displacement Mod. for grass.... will check if that has anyhting to do (but I remember in the pas having both.... some hundreth of instanciate geometry and really big surface with displacement...

Any help much appreciated.

thanks

Fermí Bertran

[GoncaloP]

Hi Fermí,

Thats not what tells the teory.... but it also happens to me

"Replicate - in this mode the geometry of instanced objects is replicated for each object. This takes more memory, but the rendering is usually faster. Note, however, that texture map channels are not replicated."

"Instanciate - in this mode the geometry of instanced objects is not replicated - it is stored only once for each type of instance. This takes less memory, but rendering may be slower, especially if the bounding boxes of instanced objects overlap."

Gonçalo

[Fermi]

Olá Gonçalo!

Call me silly but...

Could it be that in Avd. 10903j Replicate and instanciate buttons are flipped?

The Displacement had nothing to do, simpli deleted all mod. and behaves the same.

Fermí

[GoncaloP]

Who knows?!

Just try to keep at replicate if it works for you...

Gonçalo

[malleus]

We've also found the Instanciate option to be pretty broken. Generally it's doubling the amount of ram used.

M

[Fermi]

Anybody else?

Vlado?

Well, Instancied Geometry is no longer working... after certain amount.

in General Replicate behaves better until the limit of the system is reached and then VRay/VIZ crash at Geometry compilation stage.

I have hands on a big project just now, Lots of Geometry, silly me was not carefull while modeling (thought throw it all to VRay that it'll swallow everything) Oh I am the only animal to step into the same stone not twice, but infinite times over theyears with tons of foliage, strat palcing it, have a Geometry Palm Tree of about 100k poligons, seems the linit is afound 100 Palm Trees, 10 million of instanced geometry... With 1.09.02u I had succesfully managed scenes with more than 20 times that folliage! and after the Palm Trees, other species should go.... oh well.

I'll have to either:

- Reconsider the Foliage.
- Go back to 1.09.02u ... Wonder if the 03m scenes will work...
- VRay Team Super-heores jump in with a ptach

Ok, I'll start thinking seriously about test the downgrading to 1.09.02u ( I think that's the las 02 version I had installed.... I'll let you know if it works better at all.

[vlado]

Hmm. Are the actual Max objects instanciated (eg. when you replicated them, did you choose the "instance" or the "copy" option)?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Fermi]

Hi Vlado,

Thanks much for answering.

Copied as instances (as oposed to "copies" or "references")

this is how I proceed; Merge one object into the scene, place it into de scene, then Move Tool with Shit key drag the object and move it to desired location, when releasing program asks if you want copy INSTANCE or reference, then I usually rotate the object and may be scale it slightly... so the instacncing is not that evident....

But I'd bet I proceeded exactly the same in the past with 02u.

Ok

Uninstalled 03m (deleted Vray files, since Windows Uninstall only showed VRay Free installed... really don't recall when I had installed it but uninstalled all the same and 03m still there and working, so I deleted) copied 1.09.02u files to VIZ4 and plugin directories, Old scenes load and render, New scenes crash when loading. ...

So the Downgrade does not seem to be an option, Upgrading back now to 03m.

that's all.

Fermí

[Fermi]

What exactly happnes in VIZ4 is:

Preparation of the scene goes until it reaches Compiling scene Geometry using up to some 900 Mb of Memory, then it starts ramping up if Memory usage stay under some 1,6 Gb Scene renders, if it goes past some 1,68 Gb. VIZ4/VRay Freeze, memory usage stops ramping up, and Task Manager show a flat line, VIZ4 is not responding and have to kill the preocess with TM so it closes...

If I check in system Replicate, when the scene reaches a certain limit, VIZ4/Vray crash.

[Artizen]

i have noticed that groups with lots of objects have a bad impact on ram
when you use instanciate
we fixed it by attaching all the objects together,
and then making instances.
works a treat for us....if you dont mind loosing your modifier stack.
one particular model was using 300 mgs of ram till we collapsed it and joined all the parts....now it uses 50 megs
go figure