100+ Million Instances possible? Tweet

[rafg]

Searching around...100 million+ instancing possible as of Octane version 2021.1.1 ? Any successful examples, even just a box or sphere?

Running 2 3090's, 256gb system ram and hitting limit around 16 million. Low poly count but high object count.

Thanks all.

[juanjgon]

I'm fairly sure that 100 Million instances inside a single OBJ node are too much for Octane. There is a hard limit related to the amount of information that a single object can hold due to CUDA VRAM allocation. One workaround can be to create several OBJ nodes importing let's say 10M instances in each one to check if it helps.

Also be aware that if you are rendering particles, the sphere particles are a lot more efficient than instancing. You only need to enable the option to render the object as particles in any OBJ node including the particle points.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[rafg]

Hi Juanjo

Yeah confirmed that on my end regarding instances. Also tested out multiple nodes at 9 million and ran into same overall instance limit. Got much higher results with Octane Spheres as particles option as you suggest.

I did want to take advantage of using various hard edge primitives as particles (specularity, reflections) hence the instancing direction. I'm going to try and find a balance between Octane sphere particles and random geo instancing to get to my desired look.

Not sure if this is possible with aovs (as I've never used them) or the current version of Octane but could I composite multiple Octane renders (base layer and multiple additive particle layers) together or would I have to do that outside of Octane like After Effects? Essentially taking advantage of Houdini's wedging node.

Thanks.