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I have the feeling that's been related to some of my crashes too - hurray!

OK, I've been doing some tree instancing tests and it seems with complex geometry there is a near linear increase in voxelizing time as more instances are added.
eg. one tree takes 23 sec to start rendering and 144 trees took just over 48 min. (so about 20sec per tree) This seems wrong as I had hoped that with instances the tree would only need to be voxelized once. Am I missing something or is this a bug? I'm using an nParticle surface emitter to distribute the instances.

Karba's early tests in the Max Plugin
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=23032
gave me a lot of hope as his first test with multiscattered trees in Max had 3 million trees at about half a million polys each (slightly more than my trees) and I can't believe he waited 16-17 hours for it to voxelize, though I guess it's possible as I don't think anyone asked about voxelizing time in that thread. Also his total Vram use on that scene was lower than what I was getting after adding only about 20 instanced trees. Vram on my test seemed to jump up every 10 instances or so.

Is this an optimization issue, an issue with Maya and particle instancing, or to do with the octane engine itself?
Not very useable at present anyway.

T.

TBFX
Thanks for info.
I just not tested it on such a huge scenes so far, so I think it's rather the plugin optimisation issue... I will check it and fix it if it is the case.
I was ready to release today, but now I think I'll better check it first, so I think the next version will be just in a few days (perhaps tomorrow if I'll find the reason quickly).

PS. I have no such a huge scenes with trees. If you can give me some scene that huge to test the speed on it - it will save some time for optimising work instead of trying to be a 3D-artist...

JimStar wrote:PS. I have no such a huge scenes with trees. If you can give me some scene that huge to test the speed on it - it will save some time for optimising work instead of trying to be a 3D-artist...

I've sent you a PM, I hope
Let me know if you don't get it.

T.

Jimstar - is camera motion blur going to be coming to maya soon?

cheers,
JF

jmfowler wrote:Jimstar - is camera motion blur going to be coming to maya soon?

Do standalone has this function?..

JimStar wrote:

jmfowler wrote:Jimstar - is camera motion blur going to be coming to maya soon?

Do standalone has this function?..

Yes when using command line you can specify the next frame camera co-ordinates and get motion blur. Haven't tested it though.

T.

TBFX wrote: I've sent you a PM, I hope
Let me know if you don't get it.

T.

OK, I see the problem: Maya's function that gets the shaders of the mesh instance. If the mesh is huge, this function takes a HUGE time... I will try to cache it...

TBFX wrote:Yes when using command line you can specify the next frame camera co-ordinates and get motion blur. Haven't tested it though.

Interesting, though I would imagine that it needs to take the camera coordinates over multiple frames AND sub-frames to be somewhat useful. The real question would be: Is this true 3D motion blur or motion blur based solely on camera movement which does not take the movement of geometry into account (ie the whirling of an airplane propeller framed by a static camera). It's definitely a start but keep the limitations in mind.

/edit: @TBFX - Just read your two posts in the RC1 thread.

OK, I see the problem: Maya's function that gets the shaders of the mesh instance. If the mesh is huge, this function takes a HUGE time... I will try to cache it...

Jimstar,
in beta 3.0c no problem rendering time huge scenes with many trees, grass instancing