Misc - Instancing TEST

[Lewis]

Hi !
Here is one Lw11 instancing, radiosity, flocking, etc. etc. test i did recently .

Some scene stats:

- Loaded geometry 3.25 mil polys - 2 different trees, 4 type of cars (subDs levle1 for faster OGL), doves, houses, rocks, terrain, boats, yacht...)
- Single tree is 700k polys instanced 300k times over terrain (yes 300k) so RENDER polycount would be 700 000 * 300 000 = 210 000 000 000 Polys (So 210 Billions?)
- Car Hummer SubDs level 3 = 1.15 Million polys instanced 275 times = 316 Million polys
- Car Corvette C6 SubDs level 3 = 1.7 Million polys instanced 275 times = 467 Million polys
- Car Camaro SubDs level 3 = 850k polys instanced 275 times = 233 Million polys
- Car Maserati 3200GT SubDs level 3 = 302k polys instanced 275 times = 83 million polys
- Rocks, 480 poly instanced 5000 times = 2,4 Million polys
- terrain - 100k polys subdivided
- other small stuff...

So in total at RENDER tIme there is about 212 Billion of polygons rendering IF i calculated right my zeros . Rendertimes are 30-75 minutes per frame on i7/i5 machines, Took me 17 days to render on 2*i7+one i5 (specs in signature) over LWSN, Scene uses 15GB of RAM for renderign over LWSN, Radiosity 2 bounces baked (11 hours) on fastest machine, 720p resolution, AA4/AS16, Tolerance = 0.01, OS = 0.4 - it's not quite there as i would like but i had to decrease it to be able to render "soon" since i don't have renderfarm so i cant allow myself 2h/frame rendertimes and this was TEST project so i had to free up machines for clients work and render only in between and over weekends .

I hope you like it .



P.S. compression on youtbe killed clarity a bit but that's the way it is so watch 720p if you can.

cheers

[3D_CG]

Awesome work



2 thumbs up

[The Axeman]

Impressive stuff, shows off the versatility of instances really well.

[Tenement 01]

Like it!

[bobakabob]

Utterly brillant... The trees are fantastic.

[Lewis]

Thanks

[Meurig]

Is the lighting on the trees baked? Are they self shadowing and do they shadow each other?

It's certainly a good example of how instancing lets you render huge environments but the trees especially look very flat. I'm interested to know if that's due to instancing or lighting.

[Lewis]

GI is baked and very low settings (like 75/20 RPE/SBR) and that alone took 11 hours to be baked at every 5th frame on fastest machine so it looks that way a sit is. With pine trees it's little different than ordinary trees 'coz pine-tree don't have that translucent "leaves" or needles 'coz they are thicker so any SS/translucency is not really visible or not that much to notice it with motion blur/youtube compression .

Also Lw has problem with translucency when GI is on, i.e. don't take it into account as it should be (nothing new, it's that way for couple versions by now) so that probably adds to effect also . but on the other hand i dont' want to imagine how long would it render if translucency effect would d need to be calculated by GI too .

thanks for comments

[Meurig]

I was given a task a couple of weeks ago at work where I had to lay out, light and render an enormous generic environment of hundreds of thousands of buildings in multiple render layers which could be time-shifted indepdent of each other in Nuke to provide - in theory - thousands of possible variations of that environment. I had the assets ready built but rendering 50 buildings together with interactive reflection etc was a real strain and was heading toward the upper limits of what each blade Renderman was accessing could calculate before the render errored due to insufficient memory.

I had a week to come up with a way of setting this up, getting the layout approved, rendering it and getting it to the compositors to place in just shy of 100 shots.

I don't know if you have any experience of them but in the end I decided to use Brick Maps. In many ways theyre superior to instancing, though they have some similar drawbacks as well.

A brick map is a voxelised representation of geometry, so once baked your scene no longer contains any polygonal data whatsoever. Because they're voxels brick maps also have a variable level of detail which automatically up/down-rezes depending on distance from camera. They also have a gradient blurring effect which means you don't see LOD popping as you would if you were swapping out live assets.

So where each of your instanced trees is having to bake rays every 5 frames to calculate lighting, with a brickmap I make one bake of a building (or tree) and then I can duplicate it a million times in the scene and each brick map will reference that initial bake. Plus the further they are from camera the less voxels are rendered and so the lighter the scene. This means that when it comes to rendering my final scene I don't need any lights at all as everything's baked. Baking a single deciduous tree with subsurface and all the rest of it would make creating an entire forest of subsurface trees really quick and simple with brickmaps.

Each building cluster bake took about an hour - I usually queued these up and left them over night - and each layer of a few hundred thousand brickmap buildings took about 15 minutes a frame at full production quality and resolution.

They're really powerful and worth a look if you're interested in this kind of thing

http://joomla.renderwiki.com/joomla/...article&id=268

[Lewis]

Interesting, I'll examine more on this, thanks.

[bmckain]

I enjoyed seeing the final product. No matter how it was done, it's pretty impressive.

[BillS]

At 200 billion+ you are into Vue territory. That alone is impressive.

[Rigel]

That was fun to watch.

[tangster]

That looks really good, the trees worked great at mid to close range, but the baked lighting showed it up in the vista shots.

[Oldcode]

That was absolutely incredible!

[Lewis]

Hi!
Here is single frame render in fullHD to show it better upclose .
Frame is 393 (my anim speed is PAL 25 FPS so this is around 16th sec).

[3D_CG]

That, really looks like a photo... wowoow

[hugojsm]

Really awesome i really like the part probably +20 sec when you cant compare if its a real or not

[inVoxel]

This looks really amazing. For some time now i'm sending time consuming render jobs like that to a render farm. I also have a little rendering network at home for heavier jobs consisting of two i7 and one q6600 connected with butterfly netrender. But 35 - 70 min per frame is too much for me. rebusfarm is a service i can recommend. they have a plugin for almost all 3d applications including lw. from lw's interface you can submit the job to their farm in no time without any hassle.
quite recently i rendered a lw 11 animation with heavy dof and a lot mb passes on their farm. on my 4.2 GHz 2600K it would have taken about 42 hours or something like that. they did the job in 8 minutes and it costs around 15 €.
just a suggestion

[Lewis]

good suggestion inVoxel but this was jus tinhouse test with lot of tweaks and restarts so it's not something you want to send to farm. Also my upload speed is very slow so sending 1GB of content (only on tree is 150MB in file size wihtout textures) files would take me few days alone .

thanks