Transparency & opacity maps very slow - workaround?

[jwatson]

I'm sure this has been discussed before - I just haven't had time to research any other posts yet. I was just wondering if the rendering speed of transparency and opacity maps will increase any time soon. My project currently involves a large stadium with a very large crowd made up of billboards - thousands. At first I tried to render the crowd using scanline then comping over the vray stuff - but unfortunately MAX's motion blur does not match Vray's, If I wasn't using motion blur, it wouldn't be a problem plus, I have to do seperate lighting for the scanline pass to mimic the look I get with Vray. I just wish Vray handled transparency faster. Any suggestions?

Jon

[Morbid Angel]

I cant really help since Im a maya/vray user now, but I recall something about the transparency before. Basicly the idea is, since vray is a raytrace renderer, it has to trace the rays for every transparent surface and the more you have the more rays have to pass through the mattes to compute things like shadows, reflections and gi. I recall some talk about transparency cutoff threshold, which should have help with this situation. Though without max I cant really say for sure.

P.S. if you had another renderer do the same thing, like scanline, it would surely die...

[DaForce]

In the opacity map's bitmap rollout setting filter to none and bitmap blur to 0.01 will help render times quite abit with opacity maps.

Certainly worth doing.

I guess there is always the option of using displace and the water level to clip the geometry. Displacement would be slower than without tho, but might still be quicker than having alot of opacity maps.
Memory usage would be a fair bit higher tho I imagine.

[jwatson]

AWSOME!!! The rollout settings helped greatly. The frame times are a lot more manageable. THANKS!

Jon

[DaForce]

No problem. Glad to see it was so effective

[zoranm]

One of the ways, from previous builds, was to use displacment map insted of opacit by means of adjusting "water level" setting to somethong really small, thus cutting the background off.
I haven't tested it in the 1.5x build though. Anyone?

Zoran

[DaForce]

Beat you too it
See my other post above.

[zoranm]

Beat you too it
See my other post above.

That's only because you are based in Cambera and I'm in Sudney!! It's political!!!

Zoran

[DaForce]

Even more reason why I beat you too it

[jujubee]

Hmmm - apparently learn something new every day. What exactly does that filtering setting do set to none???

I actually thought setting blur to .01 slowed things down but improved quality.

[DaForce]

Setting to 0.01 or turning filtering to none achieve basically the same thing. I do both just to be safe.
It stops max from doing any filtering on the images. Which around the edges of opacity maps causes funny ness... halos..etc.. and slows things down quit alot.

So its a good 2 fold looks better, renders faster.