Pflow settings optimised for vray?

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max General
1

What are the best way to create pflow particles? ie How do the following parameters effect how vray handles the mesh… memory usage… mesh pre-calc times, etc.

Render result:

  • Single mesh?
  • Multiple meshes?
  • Mesh per particle?

I’m rendering maybe 200k lowpoly trees (200 polys each), with animated scale… so replacing the particles with vray proxies is not really possible.

Any suggestions?

2

Ok, I’ve done a quick test. Using “single mesh” causes a long calculation period that causes my OS to grind to a halt… Both during the pflow pre-calc, and the vray “Building static raycaster” calculation.

Using “mesh per particle” seems ALOT quicker, but my OS also grinds to a halt during the “Building static raycaster” process. Since my cores aren’t hitting 100% during this process, I assume the memory bus/controller is getting flooded by either Pflow or Vray and causing the OS to grind to a halt. Once the render begins my PF usage is at 7.46Gb. I have 8Gb installed.

Vlado: do you know if the memory-controller overload is due to vray, pflow, or xp64?
Is there any way to avoid this overload so that my processors can run at 100% during the calculations?

Thanks again for any advice!

3

To be honest you’d be better off baking the particles to objects in your scene - way more stable and faster.

4

You can try to use the “Dynamic” memory option in V-Ray as it saves a lot of RAM.

Best regards,
Vlado

5

Yep, the memory is already set to dynamic.
Just out of interest, how many instances of a proxy should I be expected to handle in x64 before I pass my memory limit?

It seems that anything over 100k particles pushes me over my 8gb installed.

How much should I increase vray’s dynamic memory limit to?

6

As far as I know PFlow does not really create instances of your particles, it simply copies the mesh for each particle. So how many particles can be handled depends on the number of faces in the particle mesh, multiplied by the number of particles.

Best regards,
Vlado

7

Damn.. i forgot about that! I was thinking that if they were instances then the dynamic memory vray option would do me some good.

I’ll give bobo’s particle baker a go and see what effect that has.

Thanks!