Help rendering a large remeshed neuron

[amysterling]

Hi there,

I'm working on an animation that will show an impulse moving from one neuron to the next for our lab. The neurons in the model were reconstructed by AI from electron microscopy image stacks and the meshes are garbage. So I remesh in C4D with Volume Mesher and Volume Builder, which usually works fine, but currently when I go to render it shows black and freezes C4D entirely. I've been MIA from C4D for 6 months during maternity leave so it's possible this is something obvious that I've totally spaced on.. Any help would be appreciated! Project file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y_jt2d ... X2o4h/view

Below are the neurons I'm trying to show before they were remeshed.

Amy

[bepeg4d]

Hi Amy,
just an idea, but, have you tried to bake/save the Volume Mesher in Alembic, before rendering in Octane?

ciao Beppe

[frankmci]

It seems to render fine for me on an 11 Gig card, although it does take a while to export the geometry to the GPU, and it's almost all geometry. I notice that it's using over 8 gigs of VRAM with your current settings. Does your card have enough memory? Turning your Parallel Samples all the way down to 1 from the 16 you are currently using will save you about a Gig.

I see you've also got Out of Core memory enabled, but that seems to sometimes have trouble with a few, large blocks of data, instead of lots of smaller blocks. In this case you really only have two giant meshes for two giant blocks of data. As a shot in the dark, if memory is the issue, you might try converting your Volume Meshers objects into static geometry, and cutting them up into several smaller pieces. Or if you know you won't actually be seeing much of those meshes, just prune them down to only the parts that will be visible.

If you really need all this geometry, and memory limits are what's causing the problem, you could render each synapse separately and composite them with a depth matte.

[amysterling]

Thank you! I think when the volume mesher+builder do their thing they are creating over 3x the polys for 3 'objects' so the total project poly count is over 50M. Baking as alembic fixed the issue!

Getting there!
Amy