Seating...

[BonelBalingit]

Ive got a problem. I have to design a multi purpose arena (basketball, volleyball etc...)
I've got no problems for the whole interior except for the chairs. As i put chairs into tiers it became more laggy. So what i'm trying to say is that if I can just use bump maps intsead of putting thousands of chairs? ???

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Seating...

Bump maps won't get you where you need to go because they are to limited. Displacement maps will be much more successful, but you're going to have to be willing to adjust those maps to get them how you need them. Also, displacement will help because there won't be as much geometry to export out of SU. The downside of that will be that V-Ray will have to generate that geometry, but I would bet that it would be faster and also help out your memory usage.

[BonelBalingit]

Re: Seating...

Ok thanks for the suggestion . I'll just try to fond displacment maps for the chair if there is any. Is there anyone who has displacement maps that can be used as chairs?

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Seating...

to create a chair out of a flat surface...chances are very slim that you'd find a map like that. The best thing to do would be to save your time searching and make the map yourself. I'd start really simple (a map for 1 chair and very rough) and go from there.

[JudgeBao]

Re: Seating...

Ah... My plan is to have only the backrest visible. Not the whole chair. The chair that I will put on the arena is like the one in theatres where when the chair is not in use, the seat will rise up to the backrest. So just a flat surface with a little width and depth may do. And if I can find any, where can I do itmyslef? Photoshop? Thnx for the suggestion anyway luv ya'

[nomeradona_cg]

Re: Seating...

damien perhaps this is another subject, but perhaps related. will vray support proxy or instancing?

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Seating...

Why not just create a few vertical planes and map a seat back to them? Have a few behind each other and that just might do the trick.

Yes, proxies are something that we are looking to add in the future. Although in this case I still might not use them as that many seats would make any raytracing that was needed go crazy.

[Earthling]

Re: Seating...

It seems other render engines out there - (Indigo, Kerkythea, Vue) are achieving ultra high levels of proxy instancing into the multi millions and billions of polygons and rendering in minutes and not hours.

Dolomar, do you know if this is something that will be available for VfSU? - http://www.vray.info/news/article.asp?ID=271

[JudgeBao]

Re: Seating...

waw I think that's what i need, but as for now, maybe I will just used displacement. But still, I cant find any displacement maps that will suit up the chairs and I dont know how to create one :'(, can anyone help me?

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Seating...

@ EarthMover
Proxies are high on the list to add for then next release. There are a lot of hurdles both in just making them work and figuring out how they fit into SU and user workflows, so there's a lot thats got to happen between here and there. The actually link that you posted is to an additional plugin that basically scatters, rotates, and scales proxies. I don't think we'll have something specifically like that, but as long as proxies are in there, then that extra step wouldn't be to much farther for someone (might be us) to go.

@ Judge
For all intents and purposes, displacement maps are bump maps...If you had one for bumps then just put that in the displacement slot. Keep in mind you're probably not going to be looking at these chairs close up, so don't get caught up in details that probably won't show. Get something basic in there that gets the job done, then move on to more important aspects of the project. If later down the line the chair map needs to be improved, then go back.

[peterko10ko]

Re: Seating...

ok they dont look too much like chairs but this is what i did. i used 3 colors to make a simple map in photoshop took me about 3 min. then i plugged it into displacement in vray and thats it! i made billions and billions of chairs. the quality isn't really good but with some work, im sure you can make some decent looking chairs. make sure you read about how displacement works right here, that's the best i could describe it http://asgvis.com/index.php?option=c...23835#msg23835
good luck! let us know how it goes post some pictures up when u get somewhere...

sorry, ran out of time, i'll put up the fully rendered one tomorrow. wow and i imagined they would look a little better. hmmm try making the map resolution bigger than 300x300 px my mistake. but you should get the idea....... ;D

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Seating...

Displacment maps like to be big, so make it bigger if you can. Also, Displacement also typically doesn't like sharp, flat, vertical faces. So if you could make a gradient or something so the back isn't straight, that might help.

I think you are probably going to need to tweek some settings for the actual displacement mesh, so I'll try to play around with something and see what I can pin down...this is definitely a task that will be pushing displacement to its limits. One thing I do know is that you don't want to map this on 1 big plane. You'll want to do this on a few smaller sections because a large plane will max out the available subdivisions for the displacement.

[dcauldwell_cg]

Re: Seating...

OR . . .
Another way, given that you will probably be viewing the seats from some distance away (otherwise I guess you would be modelling them) would be to get an image of one seat back, create a vertical plane representing each row of seats, and dumping the image on it, with an alpha map in the transparency slot to cut out out the back. I guess you could do the same for the seat if you needed to. I tried it and it looks ok.

David

[JudgeBao]

Re: Seating...

I'd like to thank everyone who replied at this post.

@dcauldwell
OR . . .
Another way, given that you will probably be viewing the seats from some distance away (otherwise I guess you would be modelling them) would be to get an image of one seat back, create a vertical plane representing each row of seats, and dumping the image on it, with an alpha map in the transparency slot to cut out out the back. I guess you could do the same for the seat if you needed to. I tried it and it looks ok.

David

Could you show me some screenies of how you do it? just to understand how it works. I think that the scene that I'm going to show a distance away from the seat and is more focus on the playing court. Thank you very much..

[peterko10ko]

Re: Seating...

also you could use pov to blur out the seats and focus on the court it would make it look alot better in my oppinion