speed tricks for 3d vegetation

[vermu]

Hi,

I am new to vray and I have used brazil in production so far. I have an exterior scene with quite a many 3d trees and bushes. Rendering is really fast and I happy with it but ray server takes quite a while to initialize cause of all these trees. Are there any speed tricks to accelerate the ray server calculation? All my leaves and needles are geometry. Do you guys usually render your 3d vegetation in seperate pass or maybe trunks with gi with the rest of the scene and leaves with different pass. I am using onyx tree and would like to know what's a good workflow to optimize the ray server calculation and render speed.

Thx in advance.

-Vermu

[Candelero]

Try raising the Max tree depth to 100 (default 60) and lower the
Face/level to 1.0 ( keep in mind it may eat more memory ).. Both parameters are in the V-Ray System rollout (top left)

Best regards,
nikki Candelero

[DaForce]

Also if you have any opacity mapped leaves, make sure to turn the blur down to 0.01 on the opactiy map, this will help speed up render times AND make the leaves look better

[DanielBrew]

Also turn off filtering of the opacity bitmap - speeds up render times.

[Clifton Santiago]

If you have not specified any sub-objects under the leaf adjustment parameters, you can collapse to mesh and export to Vray mesh/proxy.

If you have specified sub-objects you cannot collapse to mesh or export to vray mesh proxy, in which case keep as tree storm object but use as many instances as possible. Just use rotation and scale to introduce variety.

[ene.xis]

vray proxies will not help u lower ur rendertimes...

[DaForce]

you can say that again!!

[Clifton Santiago]

yes, but don't vray proxies initialize faster than leaving onyx tree storm objects in the scene? And also, doesn't vray render instances faster than copies? I could test it, but I'm rendering something else right now...

[ene.xis]

i think a test would be great, but as far as i know rendering geometry is faster then vray proxys...and that s that...but again....i ve never tested it

[DaForce]

Vray proxys slows down rendering... its a known fact.
They are there to lower memory limits by only loading in the geometry that is needed at that specfic time in the render.

They are most definitly slower.

I did it the other day with a bunch of poly trees... 7million polys in total i think, 19mins with proxy and 9mins with geometry.

[vermu]

Thx for the tips.

Candelero: I changed the settings but it didn't have any impact to ray server speed so I went back to defaults.

[re:FORM]

So does the use of proxies not outweigh the advantage of not needing to use dynamic memory?

I have a scene that crashes on 'static' but works on 'dynamic'.... there's only about 5 or 6 instances of each vegetation type, so there may not be much of a memory saving in using proxies to allow me to use static memory.

Any suggestions?

[DaForce]

Well proxies basically puts selected geometry into "dynamic memory" whereas switching to dynamic memory puts the whole scene into "dynamic memory"

thats the basics of it i believe.

It depends on how much its crashing by... if its only "just" running out of memory then yeah it would be worth while. Basically just try to put the most memory intensive objects into memory, which in your case sounds like the trees.
Cant hurt to try.

[re:FORM]

Ah, thanks for the explanation, that makes alot of sense!
I'll try that out.

I've thought also that I should change the max tree depth and face/level coef. back to their defaults (currently 100, and 1.0 as per a previous suggestion)... as they apparently increase memory consumption

[DaForce]

Yeah i dont know EXACTLY who those 2 things work in terms of memory usage. So I wont comment in the case that im off track.

Someone else will pipe in and set you straight tho