After reading a few articles and talking to some people about this, i thought i’d see how many trees i could actually render (using proxies)
I got to 20000!!, there are 5 different trees in this:-
Alder1 =333176 Polys
Alder2 =667365 Polys
Aspen =716303 Polys
Poplar =489887 Polys
Laurel =557522 Polys
4000 of each, thats alot of Polys!!!
Now for the 50000 barrier… 8)
ah.. that’s pretty wicked.. The best forest/tree type rendering I’ve seen on this forum.
Interesting to know about render times?
cheers,
k.
omg :lol: can you share some info on the scene jow, what was the render size and time taken to render, did you use opacity maps for
the leafs?
Also, where did you get those trees from, I’m about to do a job with a
large wooded informal garden in it and would love to use those trees, are
they onyx or xfrog something like that?
many thanks
steve
:o
The trees are Xfrog but ive modified the leaves in 3.5 so they are geometry and not opacity mapped.
Render time was 1 hour 42mins including GI at the size it is, 1400 pix wide,
Steve, 3 of the trees are from the Xfrog librarys but the other 2 i modeled myself with Xfrog 3.5.
cheers for the info jow, can you give any tips on speeding up the
rendering on trees, I’ve read a few threads about this, setting opacity
blur .01 and switching off filtering for opacity maps.
I did a test render of one of the free xfrog trees, first attempt rendered
in 3:59 at 640x480 and using the above tips this came down to 3:47.
My worry is that in the scene i’m creating the client wants a flyround of
the grounds and because a fair chunk of it is woods, the render times
per frame are going to be quiet large.
cheers
steve
Can you post rendering technique (gi methods) and render stats, cpu, and memory required.
Thanks,
Darin
renderd on single machine or farm?
Jow, i don’t think there is an upper limit in number of instances.
I’m constantly rendering trees, of late, and the only thing you should really take into account to benchmark is the number of ORIGINAL meshes loaded.
In your test you have 5, for a total of 2.764.253 original polys.
Instad, try loading 50 different types of tree, and render just one instance per tree.
That’d count more, imo.
Also, you can check your memory occupation to verify what i said about instances and unique meshes.
Lele
nice test, but rendertimes are always useless if you dont tell us what kind of pc/farm you used…
Opps sorry dudes 
It was rendered on one PC, an AMD x2 with 2gb ram.
GI was IRmap, medium preset with min/max changed to -4/-2 and LC on default settings.
Gamma colour mapping 1/0.4545
Everything else default.
Steve, the tests ive done doing what you mentioned, blur and filter, ive found that it halfs the render time.
In fact i just tried it on a tree,
Standard material with blur set to 1 and pyramidal filter= 2.32 mins
Vray material with blur set to 1 and pyramidal filter= 1.25 mins
Vray material with blur set to 0.01 and no filter= 0.35 secs!!
Lele, i know where you’re coming from, this was just a test to see how many trees i could render.I like your idea and will try it soon, it just takes ages to do the scattering, this little lot took over an hour!!
Im sure this is more than max its self could handle with out the help of the Proxys, does any one out there know how many instances max can handle??
same for Proxies, or is it just a Ram limit??
Cheers..
Hey jow!
My tests with the script for PF and proxies made max sit one hour instancing proxies, but i quit it before it managed to get to the 50k requested
I can tell you most of the time was spent refreshing the window, so it might be worth trying and optimise that part, but also that memory consumptions never rose during the instancing.
I think the question boils down to how many objects is max able to handle
Lele
I though Vray/proxies are very slow on render times. I’m using xref instances and it’s working just fine. Of course I’m not doing the the kind of jow’s work! but maybe if someone knows pros/cons between Vrayproxies vs 3dmax_xref instances that may help, well… at least to clarify me! 
I don’t get this, I tried to render a scene with less than a quater of the amount of trees you have used. I do all the optimising stuff that your suppost to (instances,vray proxy & no frame buffer) but i just get crashes.
Any ideas?
Andy, are you using the 3gb switch?
Yeh, 3gb switch, the pc I use is a 2.8ghz dual xeon with 2gb of ram.
Hi all,
I never tried so many instances and do not have time to test on 20000 trees.
But, here are 2 tests of proxies of trees created by Arboretum.
The first square has 90 trees, computed in medium mode in 800x600.
9 different trees from ARBORETUM.
The second is 9 instances of the smaller one then, there are 890 trees.
It took 25mn to compute the IrMap in 800x600 (medium mode) and
about the same for the render in 1024x768 on a small render farm of 4
computers.
More info on Arboretum:
Bye !
Gael
Andy, how many do you get to before it crashes?
How are you applying the trees, scatter, PF, by hand,…?
Best when using proxies, would be considering the use of Dynamic memory limits, if with or without 3GB you are hitting the RAM edge.
Best regards,
nikki Candelero
Nikki, is there a limit to how many proxies can be used?
excluding hardware, ram and stuff..