Help on large and dense model strategies

[tamerkseniya]

Hello dear Octaners!

I have a rather general question. I started working on visualisation for a big project, consisting of 15 residential blocks (10 to 15 stories with all window profiles etc detailing). The model actually not very big in policount, 1 200 000 something. But this is without any vegetation and landscaping.

When I start working on vegetation, I am aware the model will become very croweded and heavy. I previously did a project half this big and while testing were going fine, in the final stages, with all heavy geometry like trees cars etc, it started crashing frequently and even some copies got corrupted and didnt render at all. Because of project times, I couldnt test and find out the reasons. I had to divide the model into smaller pieces, render seperately and combine back in postproduction phase. But I am aware of awsome projects with thousands of trees...

So my question is, how is it possible? What would be suggestions to avoid crashes, to ensure some level of stability? What is the dangerous limit for polycount or maybe object number in the scene? What may cause heavy scenes to get corrupted?

My system is: 2 x GTX 980 Ti, 32 GB ram, i7 5820K

[Iceman9]

Are you using Octane Scatter as much as possible?

[tamerkseniya]

Sure, I use Octane Proxy whenever is possible. I though that if an object is Octane Proxy and it is checked as movable octane proxy, it is recognized as one object, regardless of instancing number. But apparently, it is not so straight forward. 2 instanced Octane proxies are not equal to 200 octane proxies, it get much slower while loading the scene etc.

What are scattering options for Octane?

[coilbook]

There is no better plugin for scattering than itoo forest

[mbetke]

I don't know your GPU setup and it depends on your Vram and overall system ram too. There are some things you can do:

1. Check "use CPU memory"
2. Use proxies / movable proxies as much as possible
3. Use Forest Pack Pro for scattering. At least I do and i love how efficient it is. But I never tried other scattering plugins.
4. If you are low on VRam the texture resizer plugin from Renderpeople my help: https://renderpeople.com/de/plugin/
5. Sometimes all goes wrong and crashes and you have to reduce polycounts or material complexity. Reduce far away objects using a diffuse material and only one texture for example or ProOptimizer modifier. killing intense things like displacement helps also.
6. If you have a large area with several cameras I save each camera as an own scene and delete all unseen objects. Some people work with layers and hide the unseen objects. In case of loosing background reflections you could use a backplate behind the camera to keep the reflections.

This is all I know at the moment. Sometimes you have to be creative to solve technical limits.

[paride4331]

HI tamerkseniya,
Octane 3 is limited around 40 millions of polygons,
I do not think your crashes are dependent on too many polygons.
Workflows for working with complex scenes is to use istanced objects,
scatter systems (as other people have written, there are very efficient plugins) and make movable proxy.
Other useful solutions are Octane proxys, xrefs, and display objects as box.
very complex scenes have to be managed by 3dsmax viewport using video card.
If you do not have a dedicated video card, one of your gtx980ti will have to work at the same time for Os, 3dsMax, monitors and Octane and therefore can create critical.
Regards
Paride

[Lewis]

HI tamerkseniya,
Octane 3 is limited around 40 millions of polygons,

Hmm from what i remeber it was close to 75 million polys not 40 million.
Granted i don't understand why do we even have any limit except our memory 'coz one of announcements for octane 3.x was that there wont' be any limit onto polycount anymore..

[paride4331]

Hi Lewis,
76 million triangles then 40 million polygons (about).
Equivalent to 8.5 gb Vram (approximately)
Regards
Paride

[HHbomb]

40 millions of different polys !!!! If you use several times same mesh as instance set as movable proxy, it would be just taken in account one time.

[paride4331]

HI HHbomb,
In fact I do not think the reported crash depend on by Octane, 40 millions of different polys are Octane limit, no the absolute limit with instanced and proxies.
Regards
Paride