animation: render nodes crashes/animated trees approach

[PEgaz]

Hi,
I've got problems with rendering pretty heavy animation ... I hope you can help:

1. Scene is quite heavy and it seems there's not a way to make it lighter. We encountered on a strange behavior of my render nodes - computers with XEON processors (few of them) renders it without any problem (even with 24Gb of ram) but NODEs based on i7-5930K processors hangs all the time and all of them (having 32GB of ram on board) - is there any issue connected with that processors that I'm not aware of? (btw. it's not FTH issue)

2. Models that kills the scene are animated trees.
We tried few solutions - animated proxies were extremely heavy, PointCache native to growFX was way bigger than standard max PointCache ... so after some reserch I decided to make few of them with max PointCache added - We have them on a separated container and I thought I'm so clever that everything will work like a charm ... it's not. Scene opens for ages, starts to render for ages ... and RAM usage is so huge that I needed to ask the first question above :)
What's you approach with animated trees? How to make them clever enough so that they will not kill machines with 32GB of RAM?

looking forward to your help
PEgaz

[GabaCGStudio]

are your trees instaced proxies?

set "Min Instance Saving" to 1 under development section. hope it helps :]

[GabaCGStudio]

and another question... are you using Corona 1.5? or 1.4??

[PEgaz]

Hi GabaCG,

You're right, I should be more specific with the info:
Max 2016, Corona 1.5, some non standard plugins like: BerconMaps, People from ANIMA 2.0, Multiscatter, Multitexture.

When we generated animated proxies - file were so huge that I dropped the idea of using them.
Now we have few tree meshes with PointCache animation (mesh + pointCache files was way smaller than the proxy) and we have them populated on the scene as instances and saved in separated container.
Maybe Corona prefers Proxies (even if they are much bigger) than meshes with PointCache (I will make some tests on Monday).
But I hope there is somebody who may help with better background on that topic - so that we will meet our deadline (without a delay of week of further testing :()

regards
PEgaz

[GabaCGStudio]

People from ANIMA 2.0

Remove your anima and use 3dsMax populate instead with this:http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/mcg/populate-drop-to-surface and enjoy with your renders without CRASH !! fuck this plugin :D

and if you have memory problems, you can test your scene in Corona 1.3 with bucket mode ;)

[PEgaz]

Populate is so shitty that client will not buy that "look" :), we have few people quite close to the camera so our choise was Anima.
But it's not the issue - Most of my tests are done without people from Anima and the scene  behaves like I wrote in first post.

Switching back to 1.3 may be some solution to think about - I wonder what will mess up when I switch back with Corona version but it's worth trying. Thanks.

[GabaCGStudio]

use Corona 1.6 and save your life !! :]

[Jpjapers]

If you have trees stratching far into the distance or quite far from the camera, render out some cards. whether it be top down so you can just see moving foliage or side on.
Then apply the renders to some planes and scatter those in the distance. Its used widely in VFX and saves you loads of time. plus theyre reuseable!

[PEgaz]

Hi jpjapers,
Thanks for trying to help.
All far into the distance trees are static - We used animated trees only near the camera path.
Our solution was:
1. making all trees as proxy (even if the file are way bigger than mesh+PointCache)
2. less animation frames "baked" into the proxy
3. switching to last Daily build (Oct 26)
everything works perfectly ... well .... almost everything - we encountered other problems :) - but they're in other thread.

[Jpjapers]

Ah right. Well i mean i guess cards would still help as it would drastically reduce the number of polys and light bounces possibly freeing up cpu cycles and RAM for the more intensive stuff?