hair memory issues... using over 60 gigs for 300,000 hairs

[thebeals]

Stats about scene. Using 300,000 hairs created using Shave 8 in Maya 2014, rendering in buffer mode. 1 vray area light. im and lc on med (default) settings. Render is 960X540 with hair taking <1/4 of the image space. Bucket size is set to 32. Hair and geo set to static. Aliasing set high to 1 and 32 using adaptive dmc. Vray v. 2.40.01

When I am rendering 300k hairs in Maya using default settings of im and lc and 1 vray area light, I need to set my dynamic memory to the max I can (60 gigs) to be able to get the best performance, but even at such a high number, I still run out of memory and the rendering comes to a crawl during the actual rendering part after the gi has been calculated.

If I don't use gi, my memory use still gets up to about 50 gigs. It doesn't seem to be releasing memory as buckets finish and move on. If render is cancelled, it takes a long time to release the 50 gigs of memory.

If I switch to Geometry mode, it uses about half the memory (20 gigs no gi, 33 gigs with gi), but the look is far, far inferior (in this case at least) to that which is produced by the buffer mode. It seems that the geometry mode only uses less memory because it renders about twice as fast as when using the buffer mode using the same render settings... therefore, it uses half the memory. There is a bunch of splotchiness created by using geo mode, so I would most likely have to increase hair to solve this which would increase the render close to that of the buffer mode.

Hair prims is out of the question because of instability issues.

Is there something I am doing wrong? What are your suggestions? This is only the fraction of the hair count I will need to be rendering (eventually in the millions). So it would be great to hear any thoughts or ideas.

Would messing with raycaster params help? Is there a way to force vray to dump memory as it goes along? I'll look into optimizing render settings to get the time, and hopefully memory, down... but it seems I will need to do more to be able to get this working.


Thanks for all of the help!

[Morbid Angel]

Why is the hair prims out of question? It is the option to use. I am not sure I thought vray did not support buffer mode at all? Generally speaking shave suffers from memory leak issues big time. I've tried to report them but they fallen on deaf ears, but this isnt a vray issue.

With this said, I was able to render 1-3 million strands with shave in hair prim mode, without any general issues in production without exceeding 24 gb of ram.

[thebeals]

Yea, I'd really like to be able to use hair prims, maybe I will look back into t more... but I had a lot of trouble of shave hair systems disappearing and not showing even when they are set to visible with no way of fixing the problem. The only thing that fixed it was switching out of hair prim mode to geometry or buffer. I am definitely well aware of shave memory leaks, I've had the same problems as you with reporting it onto deaf ears.

[Morbid Angel]

Yep, that's the reason I don't use shave anymore , regardless, if you have any issues hit me up, we'll see if we can figure something out I've done several productions using it and got the results (with blood) but I got them

[thebeals]

I will definitely do that, I'll send you a pm soon, so I don't flood these forums. Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it!

[jasonhuang1115]

Yep, that's the reason I don't use shave anymore , regardless,

What would you suggest to use if Shave is out of the options (speaking of Vray for Maya)? AFAIK, Yeti isn't on sale in U.S. Maya nHair or xGen maybe?

[Morbid Angel]

Xgen is shave core in my understanding, just integrated, with a better set of tools and more modern ui. Its not supported by vray yet (besides nightlies) and it will be a while before its fully usable, but it will be a good option. Maya nhair has limitations as well, inability to style them is one of many. My biggest issue with shave as a plugin is lack of support, and slow updates to keep up with newest vray development. Unfortunately, I can't suggest anything better from what you already have listed, I wish I had better news, the fact that yeti is out of action in the states is really a big slam to all the users there, the speed improvements along with memory improvements are but a few of the reasons why to choose yeti with vray for us.

[Zach Gray]

We used shave, but quit for the reasons you mentioned above.

Xgen is shave core in my understanding, just integrated, with a better set of tools and more modern ui...

I followed the lawsuit pretty carefully, and the dispute centers around a particular algorithm for interpolating guides. It's basically the only good way to do it. I think disney was a customer according to some of the posts I read, but shave was far to limited. We can't get Yeti in the US because of the settlement betwen Joe and Perigrin Labs. Ugh. So XGen is the only alternative, as maya Hair is a mess.

Xgen is so much more than shave, it's making my head spin. Every attribute is controllable by a pretty slick expression language, and its mappable and extensible. Shave was pretty easy to learn, but the hair workflow in Xgen is taking me quite a while to get my head around. There isn't much out there yet as far as training or best practices. I've got a friend on the sim team at WDFA who has given me a few pointers that have helped, but I'm still just scratching the surface.

[Morbid Angel]

I honestly think, without being offensive to any developer, that hair plugins are overly complicated, way too complicated for what they need to do. And yes I get it, its a complicated system, but from an artists point of view (the person who wants to create artistic things) not a programmer's, would be difficult to use these overly complicated tools. For me, I consider my self a mix of an artist with some ability to code, and if I have to learn yet another expression language, just for this one plugin it's just too much.
Take yeti for example, its great, but its also very complicated, and can be a pain if you don't follow its strict guidelines. This generally in my opinion is counter productive. I want a tool that with a few clicks can get me 80% there, and 20% I can spend the time on refining, fine tuning, implementing stuff.
For Xgen, like any new plugin, it will take several iterations to be usable. This is just the reality of things, and I welcome that, when time comes.

[vlado]

I honestly think, without being offensive to any developer, that hair plugins are overly complicated, way too complicated for what they need to do. And yes I get it, its a complicated system, but from an artists point of view (the person who wants to create artistic things) not a programmer's, would be difficult to use these overly complicated tools. For me, I consider my self a mix of an artist with some ability to code, and if I have to learn yet another expression language, just for this one plugin it's just too much. Take yeti for example, its great, but its also very complicated, and can be a pain if you don't follow its strict guidelines. This generally in my opinion is counter productive. I want a tool that with a few clicks can get me 80% there, and 20% I can spend the time on refining, fine tuning, implementing stuff.

It's just my personal observation, but the hair plugins for 3ds Max seem a lot more user friendly... and for whatever reasons they seem to be available in the US.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

I think Vlado, generally plugins tend to be more user friendly in max Its as if people who write them for maya think on a different plane.

But max has a few pitfalls, which make it not usable for us