Author Topic: Best practice to set up a large scene- lots of houses!  (Read 2974 times)

2022-08-11, 23:34:01

davevc

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Hi all

I am trying to work out the best practice for creating large scene files (large housing development, a lot of different house types and lots of instances of them) that does not slow your PC down to pretty much unusable.
Using 3ds max, Corona 8 and including features such as railclone for roofing tiles.

I have been exploring the use of xref objects but even with this method, the viewport is very sluggish to the point of unusable. Scene file size on disk is small which is great but not able to use the scene to build the landscaping around the houses.

Similar issue with xref scene in terms of slowing down but with the added problem of having to bind the xref to a dummy to be able to move it, mirror it etc.

Sure I used to use vray proxy many years ago, but converting railclone to corona proxy destroys the railclone, I'm not convinced this is the correct route to go down.

I am sure there must be a best practice for creating such a scene but struggling to find any good resources online.

The attachment shows a typical house we may build, simple poly modelling with a railclone roof.

Question is, whats the best way to populate a scene with lots of these. There would also typically be more house type variations and multiple copies of each

Also, to note, PC spec...
Ryzen 3950x
64GB RAM
GPU Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti

Many thanks in advance.

2022-08-12, 07:39:52
Reply #1

Freakaz

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Why don't you simply collapse the Railclone object to mesh and convert the entire house to a corona proxy? Plus if it is a large scene and to be viewed from a distance, then maybe you could replace the roof geometry with texture.

2022-08-12, 07:46:21
Reply #2

davevc

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Many thanks for your reply.
That is the method I have been using but collapsing railclone to a mesh creates two problems...
1. this increases the file size a lot as it is losing the functionality of the railclone
2. when the railclone tiles are collapsed, the embedded railclone material no longer works and you need to assign a new material, etc

I could use a texture and some are now very good (corona library and poliigon have some that work well) however along with street scenes and aerial views where you could get away with this we also need to produce individual house images, so closer to camera and the textures never look quite so good. It is perhaps something worth exploring a bit more though.

thanks again

2022-08-19, 09:46:21
Reply #3

Philip kelly

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X ref part of the scene, so buildings, landscaping, and cameras all seperte, could have a number of Buildig sets x refed.
Thats the only way I have found to handel lots of Polygones, and display them as boxes when refed in.
64GB of Ram , could be an issue, need to spend some money and bring it up. Makes a big difference.
Dell Precision T7910

2022-08-19, 10:02:24
Reply #4

davevc

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many thanks for your reply.
We have been using x-ref, you are right, it is definitely the right workflow, or seems to be.
Have been thinking about RAM, will perhaps have another look and see what costs involved.
thanks again

2022-09-01, 08:51:08
Reply #5

Alex Abarca

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I came across a similar situation. I had to model a bunch cookie cutter type houses for a background scene. It was literally thousands of houses. I modeled about 20 types of configurations to the lowest polygon count possible. As you can see in the explainer video I didn't even bother to do thickness on the walls, Finally I applied material randomizers on the roof and walls. I used railclone as you can see in the video it automatically degrades to point cloud when it reaches a high threshold.

Once I modeled the whole scene modeled I didn't open for the rest of the project since it was an xref and the master file was parked in the render manager/backburner. Whenever I needed to render an update I just reactivated the job and it picked up the xref automatically. I do these little short clips for myself to remind me of the dumb stuff I do. :D




2022-09-05, 08:54:19
Reply #6

davevc

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Wow! Thank you so much for sharing and adding the video. Thats a lots of houses! Hopefully I won't need that many in one scene ever, great to see it can be done though. Xref scenes is definitely the way to go as I am starting to realise. Thanks again.

2022-09-06, 20:36:27
Reply #7

sebastian___

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....I had to model a bunch cookie cutter type houses for a background scene. .....

How much RAM was needed to render this kind of scene ?

2023-01-06, 06:05:03
Reply #8

swindhell

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Hello, I have been working on a lot of large-scale residential/commercial developments for a while now maybe this will help you.

Here's my workflow:
1. You can finalize the type of structure you're going to use then collapse it.
2. I use Sini Software's attach by material/attach objects for optimizing models. This includes the whole site like sidewalks, roads and topo. I would use attach objects per house type then proxy\scatter it.

If you're willing to sacrifice railclone, I think this is the way to go.

2023-01-06, 17:53:23
Reply #9

davevc

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Hi swindhell
Many thanks for your message, always good to hear how others are doing things.
Interested in looking at the Sini software for attach and optimise, we use Sini for cleaning scenes up but never looked at the other options. Thanks for the heads up on this one, we will take a look for sure
all the best