Soft2Octane 2.48c [Obsolete] Tweet

[face]

Is there anything that can be done hardware-wise to significantly speed up exports from Softimage? Would a RAM upgrade from 4 to 8 gigabytes or buying an SSD have a noticeable positive impact? I'm dealing with massive amounts of strands and exports take very long, like 15 minutes often followed with a total system freeze, so I'm guessing I am badly underresourced. Also, out of curiosity, is there room for improvement in the OBJ exporter itself? Can it be multithreaded and would it be worth it, or would hard disks slow everything down anyway?

BTW, strands seem to work better and ... sorry for off-topic ;]

15min is a little bit long...
On my C2Q 6600 with 8GB ram i can export around 1mio tris in ~12sec.
This can be a single mesh with 1mio tris, a pointcloud with 83333 cubes or ~2700 strands with a cube which have 24 subdivisions on V.
When i calculate you 15min export, i would export 75mio tris.

To export strands, i create internal for every strand a bspline with the strand positions.
Then i grab the y positions from the instance shape, remove doubles, rescale them from 0 to 1 and use this values as U to read the positions, normals, binormals and tangents from the bspline.
I calculate the U only if the shape is changed. That means, if you use only one shape, i calculate it only one time.
If you use multiple shapes, it can be, that the plugin must calculate the u positions for every strand. That can cost some time.
An other thing wich can cost time is the subdivision of your strands, called number of segments in Softimage.
Because i use internal a bspline, the strand can have minimum 1 seqment. The rest of needed points will be calculated so that my bspline will have 3 points.
My hint is to use so few segments how possible. It makes no sense to use 1000 segments if you can have nearly the same result with 100 segments.
Here a example:

You should also avoid to rotate the shape because then the plugin must calculate more U values.
Example:

For simple particles, i have a routine which sorts the shapes, so that the plugin export first all particles with shape one, then with shape two and so on.
This will save time to read in the shape geometry to the number of used shapes. The plan is, to implement this also for strands.

The use of a SSD will not speed up the export speed, maybe more ram will have an effect.
Also the use of multithread export will haven´t much speed improvements, because the logic and managment behind it will negate the effect...

Hope this helps you a little...
face

[face]

Hello, is there any difference between exporting for "render frame" and "render animation" ? I have cached lagoa cloth simulation, when i'm setting it up through "render frame", everything looks nice, but when i'm starting to redner animation its sending something wrong to octane. Unfortunately, i can't send screenshots at the moment. It looks like something getting wrong with normals. And as it goes further from the first frame it getting much worse.
Switched to Octane2Softimage, but it has problems with memory leaking.
Soft2Octane has very nice stabillity, only that animation exporting glitch ruins it all.

Yes, thats correct, there is a difference between the two.
The problem was, that i has read the CRef of the mesh, means the reference where the geometry data is stored, only one time before i export the mesh.
When i then change the geometry, the CRef is the same, but the geometry data inside the reference, primary the normals, wasn´t updated.
Have soveld this in the next version, which i will upload in 10min

face

[erik_gromilov]

Thanks, F5-ing this topic to download fresh version.

[jamnique]

Thank you for the detailed answer face. I have just one segment per strand and one shape (box with no subdivisions in V). Still, the meshes i was trying to export had 3-6 million polys. I can't even imagine how long it would take me to export 75 millions ;] I guess it must be RAM then. Since i can export 1 mln pretty fast and hit a wall around 3-4 mln.

By the way, do you think Octane instancing will work for strands? So you would generate the splines and instantiate along them in Octane? It would make rendering strand scenes practically instantaneous (and cool).

[face]

I don't know how instances in Octane will work, but i think strands would only work, if if the strand isn't deformed. but then you can use also particles...

face