Hi there,
I have a new problem. Ive just created a large grass texture. It also has displacement applied to it. When the lightcache is being calculated cpu usage only goes to about 13% usage. I have dynamic memory set to auto & 2500mb and I have 6gb of ram. Also lightcache passes set to 8.
Any ideas ?
Update: I just restarted max and the lightcache processing is fine…what is happening. I did open photoshop to tinker around with the texture (which is about 10000x6000 pixels). Do you think there may be memory issues. I dont use bitmap pager…is this something that could help? I dont even know what it is used for..
ok. I did a search, as I remembered somewhere about being able to clear the cache in max. The cache clear didnt work: gc(), but freeSceneBitmaps() did work. Not sure why the lightcahce is struggling at times. I wonder if it is because photoshop is using memory and vray is struggling to find the memory to do the light cache efficiently ?
Vlado ?
well, typically if you are rendering displacement, any processing will take longer, since if you are using a 3d displacement, the preprocessing will take extra time (for displacement) calculation and is not multi threaded. But if you are using 2d displacement, there could be something else.
I am only using 2d displacement. I have resized all my extra large textures (10000x6000 pixels) to half size and that seems to have improved it somewhat. My cpu sitting at 2% whilst it trys to process the displacement is a long way short of 1 cpu at 100%. It seems to definately be linked to memory. Each time I clear the bitmaps and they reload (especially after using photoshop to tinker around with some textures), it works fine. If I dont do that, it is a much much longer wait.
what are your displacement settings? also why are your textures so large?
I was trying out extra large grass textures (taken of my garden) stitched together to reduce the amount to tiling. Basically the texture covered a larger area so less need to tile. My displacement settings are pretty default apart from the amount. I have the dynamic memory set quite high also.
Mix Material
To try & conserve memory you could try a mix map on two smaller textures.
Materials/Map types/MIX
Simply use two different bitmap grass textures & mix them together with a max procedural noise map. Because the noise map does not repeat [because it’s computer generated to always be random] you get a nice NON-TILING texture. Make your noise map black & white. Black will be tex1 & white will be tex2.Use the noise map tweaks to control how it blends.
Not sure how mix maps go with displacement though?? Fast--slow?? Anyone else know??
Also remember to have your grass mesh as a nice & clean quad mesh. And the more your mesh is subdivided the less work vray has to do [no big & uneven triangles.]
Hope this helps
Hi
sometimes we turn Displacement off for the LC calcs, save the LC, switch to from file then turn Displace back on for the IRR map cals … seems to work fine..
N