Fir tree + memory load

[danio1011]

Hi - I am doing some nice fir trees in GrowFX right now and am noticing that I'm getting a really 'heavy' tree as far as memory. My 'needles' are just flat, skinny planar leaves basically. I'm really happy with the results, just kinda amazed at how HEAVY the tree is (5-6gb at render time). If I go lighter on the needles I don't get the realism.

 

I only have one size of needle. Would it work to model it from a plane outside of growfx, convert it to a VRay Proxy, and then use it as an 'instanced geometry' in GrowFX? Does the memory savings from a VRay Proxy carry through after you convert your GrowFX tree into a mesh\editable poly and proxy that?

 

I had tried doing long leaves that are parallel to branches and using a cutout map with skinny needles in the opacity map. Maybe 20 needles to a map. This never seems to look as good tho.

 

Thanks for any tips anyone has,

 

Dan

[ptrain03]

hm, just guessing, but if you just model the leaves separately and use the instance geometry for your fir needles you should get a substantial memory savings just due to the fact that you are using instances. Using bounding box displays for your instances should also cut down on your video memory consumption. I tried to use a mr proxy but no dice. Im not sure about vray proxy.

 

dang, thats a big tree ! how many polys?

 

I could be wrong but Its worth a try.

 

 

Edit: I just made two identical models, one using grow fx procedural leaves, and one using referenced geometry. Their footprint at rendertime appeared to be about the same as did their saved file size (so Im guessing that grow fx path geometry is referenced as well) . If you convert to mesh the file becomes huge, but in general gfx files are pretty small. My tree was 500000 polys and took up about 500 MB to render ( both ways).

 

Hopefully Eduard will be more helpful

[danio1011]

I tried some VRay proxies. Didn't seem to work well...GrowFX chugged for a while and then it almost seemed like memory footprint was bigger. I will try again soon.

 

 

 

Tree with high needle count is 2.5 mil polys, tree with 1/2 as many needles is 1.5 mil. I think I can get by with fewer needles but it would be nice to know if I'm 'missing' something with my worfklow that could make confiers more accessible. Proxied needles would bring me down to VERY low loads!

[danio1011]

BTW, Here are a couple of images showing the tree I'm working with plus some other plants I've done in GrowFX lately:

 

 

 

 

[Eduard]

Hi,

 

Of course, you can try to turn off the Combine meshes in the Instanced geometry settings. It will not allocate memory for each instance, and will use only one instance. But it work only for Default scanline render or MentalRay. For VRay renderer growfx object will be converted to a single mesh.

Have you tried to convert your tree fully to VRay proxy? This should help you.

 

PS: We'll try to implement support a vray proxies for the instanced geometry...

 

Edit: Also, if you use a flat needles, you can add Vector orientation direction, then turn on the Use view as target point and using the X or Y-axis set the Strength% equal to 100. This will turn all of your needles facing to the camera.

 

Cheers

[Eduard]

BTW, Here are a couple of images showing the tree I'm working with plus some other plants I've done in GrowFX lately:

Hi Dan,

 

Yes, your trees and plants looks very realistic

 

Cheers

[danio1011]

Eduard - Thanks for the reply. I have turned these into proxies. They are still fairly heavy if I do the poly count I really want. I'm planning on moving from 16gb to 32gb soon anyway so not a big deal, but it'd be cool to be able to do really high poly conifers using a proxy as an instance or something.

 

Thanks!

 

EDIT: Thanks for the complement :-) Mostly thanks to GrowFX being an awesome tool to work with!