High node count when using cloners Tweet

[bodywash]

Haven't been able to find any resources for this anywhere so I figured I'd make a thread about it.

I've been running into an issue recently where starting a render in a scene where I got a material on a cloner the IPR will say I have hundreds nodes and if it gets high enough it'll lock up and I have to force quit. Is this a thing? It seems like it's multiplying the material for each clone and I don't have any idea why this is happening. I can't remember it being an issue in the past and I can't find other information on situations like this anywhere.

Running R20 and V4.05 R7.

[aoktar]

Don't you use "render instance" option or scatter object?

[bodywash]

I've had to do that to get scenes working yeah but I was just wondering if it was working as intended or if I was doing something wrong. I get everyone's machines and setups are different but I can barely get a a scene with 300+ nodes to function meanwhile I see people with 5000+ nodes a scene no sweat. Is there something specific hardware wise that could be bottlenecking me? Whenever I start a render or IPR with an instanced set up like that Cinema's CPU and GPU utilization are basically non existent.

[nejck]

I think you should post your PC's specs here. If you are running on a 3 GB then yeah, getting a ton of trees in there will be a pain

As a general rule, you should always use instancing as much as possible (render instances are a must, multi instances are even better).

Maybe if you could record a video of your scene setup and how it locks up we could help better

[bodywash]

I'm running a 1080ti, Ryzen 1800x, 32gb of ram, and Octane v4.05r7.

I was shown a method of building structures like castles or whatever using cloners. I can use render instances but that detracts from the look since procedural textures aren't dynamic and repetitions are easily visible. I attached an example of how it's set up. Just a bunch of cloners all grouped in a null so the material applies to everything the same while procedural textures treat it as one massive object.

The guy who showed me this method regularly hit over 5000 shaders using this method but I asked him and he's had no issues with responsiveness, the only difference being that he has two 1080tis. I'm wondering if maybe since I only have one and it's doing both display and rendering if that could be causing the issue.