OTOY Forums

Hello,

I have 24 hours (from the start of this post), to submit a 10 - 20 second long animation of a subject I modelled, the hing is, I didn't really have much time to model it, and would very much appreciate if I could leverage octane's immense power to render tens of millions of poly's of instanced foliage in order to 'cover up' my not-so-great model... The wall I'm hitting is my low 4GB ram, although I plan to upgrade to 32GB soon, I cannot get it in the course of the next 24 hours...

So again, the problem sits in the fact that as soons as I instance more than ~3-4 mil polys my RAM goes bust, and CPU starts cache-ing on the HDD... I don't have a problem with that, the problem sits that even extra 10GB of virtual HDD ram I allow is not enough to cover ~5 mil polys, and so I'm asking you how do you instance your folliage and how does it fit into your RAM?

I know for a fact you only need a bit of RAM to 'load' the scene into your VRAM, where the CPU load goes up, a TON of raw data is stored in the memory before it all gets dumped in a very neat fashion into the VRAM(e.g. ~6GB of raw data stored in the RAM will translate as ~300MB of data in VRAM) ...

How do people overcome this? What should I do?

Here's a couple of instancing threads that I found here on the forums:

Jan Kudelasek, 8GB RAM

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=22583

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=23230

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andrian: 32GB of RAM

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=22584

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There's plenty others...

Now I know I can set an object I want to instance as 'octane movable proxy', in which case I can paint my foliage in real time, with small to no impact on my memory, but that only applies to octane viewport, as soon as I want to render an animation, it has to load ALL the geometry(instanced or otherwise) into RAM, and pass it to VRAM later... So as far as stills go, I can see it happening...

But the third example I've shown has a video, and even if you say he has 32G's of RAM, he also has 645 Million of polys... -> way above my anticipation, and way above of what he should be capable storing into that massive RAM anyways...


Any ideas?

Quick please,

Thanks.


Warm Regards,

Jani.

you can't work with 4GB of ram and Octane

Octane eats a lot of system ram during the voxelization process, more than the vram needed for the render.

The good thing is that Octane gpu needs less ram than Vray cpu (because the single precision computing)

Hello, I managed to get around the problem (somehow), so the next wall im hitting is the fact that 3ds mas doesn't like to see tens of thousands of boxes and it's eating away my cpu to instance some more... (I have bounding box in viewport, even set my VP rendering as OpenGL to conserve ram and rendering speed)...

How do people get around that?


Thanks...

For those interested on seeing how I pulled through, here's the animation:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OT9DPyCrR0&feature=plcp[/youtube]

300 mil polys

127 frames at FullHD, 5 mins per frame, light post-process(Colour correction, Camera Transition)

Seeing as I managed to make the deadline, I look back and say, money well invested.

Thanks for all the support.

Jani.