Xivon Environment Assets - Wow but Ouch
Xeni88
Posts: 27
I gotta get something off my chest. I love @Xivon Enviroment Assets. I have already bought a huge set of collection. Every new release is pushing the level of detail to next level. However, there is a BUT. I can't help to notice that these scenes are a massive memory hog. Granted I am rocking 3080 which is slightly below mid level GPU in 2025 but I can pretty much run most of the larger scenes from other PAs without any hiccups. But with Xivon assets, I constantly find myself running Decimator and Scene Optmizer scripts just to see an Iray preview. The polygon count on these scenes is extremely high. Not to mention 4K textures and gazillion instances on top of it chokes up the memory
So, my only wish for @Xivon is to be mindful of memory use. Polish, Stonemason, Fugazi etc.....all know how to create high quality scenes without bogging down the GPU. Even the PW Production who is the King of Large Scale assets understands this very well. Perhaps @Xivon should consider creating sections of the large scene like PW, so that it is easier for low to mid level GPUs to digest. That's all I gotta say, keep rocking!
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Comments
Only 496 MB.
To me, the bigger issue of Xivon's sets is the quality of the textures. While their settings look stunning as a whole... not so much in close ups.
Its not the size of the download that is problematic for me. It is that it doesn't fit in my GPU to render it.
I have similar thoughts. And that many products have only a few mono meshes with single surfaces, and that practically pushes towards larger textures of lower quality. I spend a lot of time breaking up the geometry of XI products, resurfacing them and putting nicer shaders on. While I wouldn't pay Stonemason prices for them, they're often reasonably priced for what they are - striking at a distance and a particular angle but full of technical shortcuts that make them difficult to work with.
I've not played around with the very latest XI releases. If they're now making better use of instancing, that would be a clear improvement in my eyes.
I buy lots of their sets, eventually this one too, (I am not DAZ+ so not now. There's always another sale)
however I rarely render them in DAZ studio
(mostly Twinmotion)
or split them in Carrara
I have an active ticket about https://www.daz3d.com/xi-futuristic-nightclub (which used to be in two of the Josie 9 bundles before they did the reorganisation of the core bundles for Premier).
Originally sent in the ticket as "cannot fit this onto a 12GB RTX 3060, even despite having a secondary card that's freeing up monitor RAM, which I suspect makes it unusable for a large portion of your customers".
Months later got back a ticket saying "Are you still having this issue, please test it in the latest version of DS". And very much felt like sending back a sarcastic "do you think some Iray update has suddenly unlocked several GB of new VRAM on my computer?" response, but instead got to send back "No, now I can't get it to load on a 16GB 4070TiS".
Still waiting on a fix to bring down the VRAM usage, because frankly, I think it's silly for products to be released with VRAM requirements so high that it's not possible to load them on a card that's only one VRAM tier down from the top flagship cards, even with the benefit of a secondary card that's taking all the monitor and OpenGL load.
My opinions of them (as I understand that Xivon is a studio) as a vendor are... patchy at best. Some of it's alright. At other times it's got bonkers surface assignments or huge VRAM load and is a pain to do any work with.
I've gotten some nice use out of the Viking Camp... however, I have to figure out what area I want and delete literally everything else to make it work. I have a few of their other sets but haven't played with them yet (one of those "oh I bet I'd use this someday, and that's a fantastic price" situations) and now I'm apprehensive.
I do not think the environment looks good enough to justify that level of VRAM use, considering what else is on the market, and those products actually fit on GPU.
Clearly optimisation is needed.
Do you that camp with the viking ship by Xivon?
...hmm, I have a couple sets (including the latest release) but haven't used them yet and I'm still running an old 12 GB Maxwell Titan-X with only 24 GB system memory.
If the Prague set chokes a 16 GB card, sounds like even a 24 GB RTX Pro 4000 may not br up to the task. Given the recent price spikes for both GPUs and particularly memory to support a high VRAM card, it kind of contradicts the notion of this being a "hobby".
I think with their products, it's a hit or miss. I remember when the viking camp came out, everyone was saying it was a memory hog, so I stayed clear. Some other sets, like the Steampunk City, seem to render fine, even with a bit of fog added. But the unanimous texture is an issue both in the quality and the fact that you can't edit what you need, even in terms of something simple like luminance of windows for the night shots. Steampunk City has two material options, day and night, but Prague doesn't, and it has some windows lit anyway.
I did get it, but mostly, because it was cheap. At this stage, I would pretty much never buy Xivon's works at any price higher than a $5 because of all the risks and issues related to those products. For $5 or less, it's a fair game, and I'll likely get some use of it (if nothing else, of the zero props) for non-close up shots and background clutter. But for more? I'd be disappointed.
Isn't this is the case with lots of sets* - especially once you've loaded figures, costumes and additional props?
I tend to go for a wander in viewport, pick angles/buildings I like for a render, and then delete everything else (or, if the creator has allowed it, reload just individual assets). Yeah, it's a pain - and there's a thread "somewhere" with a couple of tools that lessen that deletion workload - but it does get you scenes that load into memory (a character or two included) and still produce fantastic renders.
I also have all of Stonemason's Greeble City series, which make great "far backgrounds" for many other (sci-fi) scenes and are very lightweight.
* That's not to excuse sets that total > 12GB, which is just silly
Click Video to play
I have so many Twinmotion renders of their sets I cannot share them all but I can try and find a video one from this list if anyone wants to see another
I have many more sets not exported to TM or rendered
WendyLuvsCatz That's really neat! Nice seeing characters in the space and the cat!
How easy/hard is it to mess with items from DAZ in Twinmotion?
....very nicely done. Seems Twinmotion handles the load pretty well.
The Royal Palace Bundle is one of the sets I have. The other is the Fairytale Bundle That I recently picked up.
Rendering that dining room scene with all those characters in Iray on my anicent system would likely crash the programme in the first few seconds and possibly even take the display driver with it
I need to use an earlier version of Twinmotion to import the diffuse textures original file paths
probably not available to people "buying" it for free now
so that and chasing up all the other maps, consolidation of materials is likely the most off putting thing
a lot can be solved by simply exporting maps to a bespoke folder for your project, I jst prefer to avoid bloating all my drives needlessly
Xivon textures are extra nested in many subfolders making using original paths extra excruciating
Fugazi does this too
otherwise, it's easy to use and had lots of other awesome features
terrain sculpting and painting, brushing animated foliage, full weather system with volumetric clouds and rain, snow, fog, particles to name a few
I am just wary now about discussing or suggesting TM to others because of a lot of pushback and moderation in the past
there is absolutely NOTHING in it for me
if anything I suspect they want people to stay in DAZ studio and buy extra products such as Ultrascenery to do what TM does for free
Thx for the info.
I think with the bridges (DAZ to Unity, Unreal, Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D), etc... crossing between programs is even more accepted than before, and there is now the "common enemy" the AI.
HDRI, billboards, viewport screens, etc... were the basic fast imports and exports. If I buy something, I want to get it to work, fit into my GPU. If it doesn't fit into my GPU or it's reported to be too hard (commercial-center) I don't buy it. So any idea to get it working is a good idea.
How is AI the enemy? I use AI on every project i have with DS.
As for the original topic, there are way to many assets, environments, clothing, etc that are not optimized for DS use on mid level PCs. I have a long list of PAs I will not buy from because their work is either way to detailed to use, or just bloated and unable to use once you add anything else into the scene.
I'm sorry for having to ask this because it's probably clear as daylight, but - if a Xivon asset is, say, around 500 MB like the Prague scene they did lately, and it has rather low res textures then how does this happen that it takes up so much VRAM? I have a few of their environments that I'd planned to start using later, but now I'm kinda scared of even trying, because I'm on a laptop with a 2060. I knew the big scenes like the Viking camp weren't for me, but it sounds like a more general problem now ...?
I don't think Prague is one of those memory-hogging scenes. When i did a test render (nothing added, standard Daz HDRI), it rendered quick and fine.
Unfortunately, it means that you will never know what's going to work until you try it. That's why I personally don't buy their products unless heavily discounted to avoid disappointments.
Polygons is more VRAM hungry than high res textures. I once tried opening a single obj prop with high polygon count (no shaders or textures) and it crashed the Daz . So, high poly count is an issue for both; GPU and Daz. Total scene file size doesn't equate to high VRAM use. PW production's full scenes are almost always over 1 GB but I can open the entire scene with iray preview because it's low poly and medium res textures
Rendering it alone, it used 8.1 GB of VRAM, by comparison, Street of Japan 2 or Village by the Sea needed around 4.3 GB of VRAM in the same condition.
In all cases, around 3 GB are, I think, required by Iray itself, but it still leave Prague requiring around 5 GB of VRAM on its own.