OTOY Forums

So, I noticed that using the particle system and converting the curves to meshes doesn't really give that great of results (and eats up a lot of memory) so I modelled my own grass (nothing really fancy, each blade of grass has 4 faces) but now I notice that the transferring part of the rendering literally takes forever to do. It doesn't eat up much of my vram or anything (about 250 mb - I think a bit less not including the ground plane) so I don't quite understand why it takes so long for Blender to transfer the information. I presume it's something being worked on for the plugin.

But until then, is there a better way to make grass?

Are you converting the particles to mesh?

You should just select the emitter plane, then export the instances with the plugin and setup the grass as a scatter in Octane. It will be very quick and easy and will only load the geometry for one blade of grass.

Export them as a scatter? I'm using the integrated plugin, so shouldn't it already do this for me?

Sorry for some of the confusion should clear it up: I converted the particles as a mesh (the hair particles) and that didn't work out very well. I then switched to making my own grass mesh and using the particle system to scatter it. But now the transferring takes a really long time.

Sorry, I thought you were exporting to stand alone.

Select your grass mesh that you are scattering. Go to the mesh tab and change the mesh type from global, to scatter.
Make sure you are not over riding the mesh types in the render panel (it should be "as is").
This should export the single mesh once and then scatter it, saving on time spent transferring data to the GPU.

Not a problem! I'll be sure to say I'm using the internal plugin next time I need some help.

But thanks for telling me this, I had no idea about the scatter option in that tab. It really saved on my memory and time, thanks so much!

Choosing the geometry type is very important for speed.

If you have objects moving around, but the mesh doesnt change (just location/rotation/scale), make the geometry for that object "movable proxy". This will make it send the geometry to the GPU ONCE and then just update it's transform values each frame. If you have it set to global, it will send the geometry to the GPU on every frame, which will slow your overall animation by a lot.

If you are just moving the camera for an animation, you can set the animation type to camera only and it will only update the camera for each frame which is great for things like fly throughs.

Interesting, thank you for the heads up. Is this in the manual for Octane? I don't recall ever reading about this. But then again I was only looking at the material sections mostly.

It will be very quick and easy and will only load the geometry for one blade of grass.

Hi, This remark is for people exporting to Standalone, but is also true for any instance : Don't use instances for single blades of grass : You will not save memory. To be efficient, all instances must use much less bytes than real objects would. If your scatter object is very simple, the amount of objects coordinates will represent more data than the geometry itself. It is better to use less objects of higher complexity : like grass tufts or patches.

Ah, I didnt think of that because I use patches of grass anyway. but good to keep in mind

ROUBAL wrote:

It will be very quick and easy and will only load the geometry for one blade of grass.

Hi, This remark is for people exporting to Standalone, but is also true for any instance : Don't use instances for single blades of grass : You will not save memory. To be efficient, all instances must use much less bytes than real objects would. If your scatter object is very simple, the amount of objects coordinates will represent more data than the geometry itself. It is better to use less objects of higher complexity : like grass tufts or patches.

I should have clarified that I'm not instancing a single blade of grass, I am doing multiple tuffs of grass. It works out better for the overall look. I noticed putting in just a few strands for an object causes my grass to look to too wispy.

With that being said, I can't wait to use the hair node when it comes out. Hopefully it looks good as grass.