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tips for using ultrascatter to make massive environments manageable?

jardinejardine Posts: 1,218
in The Commons

does anyone have any tips for using ultrascatter to make ultrascatter-based environments more manageable?

my GTX 1080 has been breaking its teeth on 'mossy hollow' and retreating jerkily into CPU render mode for three days straight now.  but the environment and the light/shadow effects it provides are so gorgeous that i just can't walk away from it.

i have switched my iray memory settings from 'speed' to 'memory'.  which was enough to stop studio from really locking up and/or crashing.

i've subtracted the weed, palm, and bromeliads from the scene--the base sets, the instance groups, and the proxies.  and i've tried wrangling the distribution maps in the set's textures folder in the hope of dropping all the instances that aren't in my camera's field of view...replacing the existing maps with versions that black out about four-fifths of the terrain.  but either i'm not doing that right, or doing that isn't enough to get my renders running on my GPU.

any--*any*--help (help!) would be appreciated like you wouldn't believe. 

thanks!

j

 

Comments

  • FSMCDesignsFSMCDesigns Posts: 12,847

    Good luck, sounds like you have done what you can to squeeze out a few more resources already.! I just stopped buying those kinds of sets. It's one thing to produce a nice looking promo, but quite another to use them as background environments with other objects in the scenes. I was optimistic when harpwood trail was released for DS, but found it unusable in the end, no matter how great it looked by itself.

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 26,428

    You can use the geometry editor to create a selection set that encompasses only what is visible in your viewport. Then you can rescatter and limit the scatters to only the selection set. I'm not sure if that would be any better than the modified distribution maps you've already tried, though.

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 26,428

    You could use Scene Optimizer to reduce the size of the textures.

  • jardinejardine Posts: 1,218

    thanks.  i was thinking that i was all alone in the crunchy zone.  and guessing that it was probably because my studio kung fu is still so weak.  :)

    yeah...

    less resource-intensive sub-scene loads would certainly be nice.  (!)

    seems like environments created with ultrascatter would lend themselves to that.  instead of populating the whole landscape with 112,000 widely scattered instances of things, populate quadrants or sectors of the container terrain node with 28,000 or 18,000...

    i'd rather not, but i'm kind of okay with having to run a render overnight, if i really, really want the image.  the issue i can't get around is the incredible amount of time it takes to preview and adjust my lighting setup...which is really crucial when you're dealing with an environment that has so many objects (and instances) casting shadows.  i can only test nine or ten HDRI + light rig setups a day with this beast, and i can usually check out twenty or thirty in an hour.  :/

    sure is a beautiful set, though.  so i'm going to stick it out for another day or so, and hope i get lucky. 

    :)

    j

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,095

    Thoughts:

    Iray section plane to remove stuff off camera.

     

    I don’t know how it works with existing ultrascatter instances, but when I’m creating my own I like to select everything around camera view (moving back a bit so it extends a little out of shot).

    Go into Geometry Editor with the ground selected, marquee style selection, then drag across everything in the viewport.

    Create a new surface, copy whatever the main surface texture is to the new surface.

    Now you can scatter only on the surface in shot without creating a thousand instances you’ll never see.

     

    Mind you, there are some drawbacks; any reflections will reveal stuff out of frame. Also, the lighting will be different if there are no trees (or whatever) filtering light that hits the scene.

     

  • jardinejardine Posts: 1,218

    thanks, will...

    (and thank you, too, barbult...i missed your replies earlier, as i was responding to fsmcd when you posted.)

    i think i will try the camera section plane next.  with richard's 'clip shadows' trick.

    and thank you for the geometry editor walkthrough.  i've been wondering how to handle translating an existing terrain surface texture onto a modified terrain volume. 

    i'll try these as soon as my current render of the scene stops grinding.  probably in another four hours or so.

    j

  • ArtiniArtini Posts: 10,451

    Or, use the Unity...

     

  • FSMCDesignsFSMCDesigns Posts: 12,847
    Artini said:

    Or, use the Unity...

     

    Defeats the purpose IMO. If I wanted to do something outside of DS I would use Cararra, Vue, Max, terragen, etc

  • HowieFarkesHowieFarkes Posts: 624

    The previews of most items in the scene are set to 'none' - basically only the lowress tree proxies and maybe some bounding boxes of some other things are left on to show the position of the paths etc. Not really sure what else can be done. I created all the scenes on a Mac Pro (4 years old) that doesn't even have Nvidia so everything is renderd in CPU - but I come from a background in Carrara where waiting a few hours for a render is quite normal.

  • outrider42outrider42 Posts: 3,679
    What about Octane? It can render scenes on GPU that exceed the VRAM. And its getting a Daz plugin.
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