How to organise huge 3D scenes

[lightshape]

Hy there,

we are working on a huge car scene, with lots of technic like engine, chassis and stuff like that. The scene is separated in many different scenes. All these different scenes are about 500MB in MAX with at least 2-5mio polygons.

What I would like to know: Did anybody invent a workflow handling such a huge amount of polygons? Sure, XRef is a solution, but it´s not as handy, as I expected. How about VRay Proxies?

Just generally speaking, but I am interested in organising this monster. Right now, opening the engine scene takes about 10minutes. Amazingly VRay can render this without a problem…

Help would be nice...D.

[tricky]

Well we've worked on some pretty big scenes, but nothing quite as big as that! One current project consists of about 20 large office buildings on a new business park. We are making extensive use of XREF scenes to help us. Its not without its problems, but in general, it seems like a reasonable approach. We have one main builing file, on glass file, one interior furniture file, one blinds file etc for each building, so we can switch them on or off as we see fit.
The names of the XREF files are fixed, but each building has its own working model whose name is changed as the design changes, for example, BUILDINGA_01, BUILDING A_02 etc, and when the XREFs need updating, they are just overwritten as needed.

[instinct]

XRefs are the way to go i'd say. I recently handled a 14mio poly scene and it still worked pretty damn fine given the size. Beeing able to unload things is a major plus.

Regards,
Thorsten

[3sgteMKI]

XRefs are the way to go i'd say. I recently handled a 14mio poly scene and it still worked pretty damn fine given the size. Beeing able to unload things is a major plus.

Regards,
Thorsten

+1. I'm working on a scene right now with about 6 xrefs in it, ranging from about 400MB to almost 1gb in size. It does take forever to load and work on, but it's at least manageable. Having a monster PC is the biggest help.

[pg1]

we work on a lot of masterplan scenes that get quiet big
xrefs are the only way that we could keep working on them
Rpmanager is also very useful for large scenes, it has many features including xref management per pass

[lightshape]

We just ordered more RAM, expecting that it should run a little smoother. I just read about the RPManager, but I think there are too many options to tweak and with these monsterfiles, we´d need to have a "smaller" tool...

Thanks anyway for the advice, it´s worth a try with smaller scenes...


...d.