How you handle large amounts of grass in your scenes?

[Rhodesy]

I think the issue is that C4D itself struggles to handle millions of objects due to the way it has been coded. For what I can see Max can handle a lot more. I've been down this road a long time ago and basically given up trying to create convincing scattered grass over larger surfaces. It will just eat your RAM and you can spend hours struggling over it and generating it when you can do it much quicker in photoshop. Im hoping Coronas hair solution slated for 1.7 in the MAX version will help us create decent grass.

I believe Carbon Scatter works slightly differently but I wouldnt recommend it as it is a quirky work flow and not as integrated. Forrester is as good as SS but you also get the tree and plant generators thrown in and they are pretty powerful once you get to grips with them.

[Marian]

C4D R19 will add multithread into Mograph (cloner).

[Rhodesy]

Is that a confirmed fact, how do you know? Awesome if it is. Hope the third party plugin devs can access the same multithreading code for their scatter engines. That will make a massive difference.

[mp5gosu]

Is that a confirmed fact, how do you know? Awesome if it is. Hope the third party plugin devs can access the same multithreading code for their scatter engines. That will make a massive difference.

No, I doubt there will be multithreaded Cloning. ;)
@Marian: Even if you might know what comes, that info is not meant for public right now.

[Marian]

Ok,Im propably too much optimist...Not sure that it will really come in this release, but there are some signs out there that it might be true in near future. Look for example at https://youtu.be/xGj57citzUc?t=14m55s or on their blog about rewriting their old code for newone https://www.maxon.net/en-us/news/maxon-blog/article/foundations-for-the-future/.

[mp5gosu]

Yes, building a new code base is what Maxon works on for several years now (when I remember  right, it began with R13) and this is progressive task. So, most likely it will take another 3-5(or even more, maybe less) releases to completely move to this basis.
Besides that, new features will also have to be built based on that, existing ones have to be rebuilt. C4D has decent and extremely good MT implementation yet, that's why Cinebench is so fast on multithreaded machines and used by chip vendors to show of their capabilites.
And to conclude this, keep in mind that there are cases where multithreading makes things slower.

By the way, writing down things like "This and that will be in next release" isn't helpful for anyone. That only leads to confusion and disappointment.

[Han]

I made a scene with 114 163 billion polygon  with the help of MoGraph the cloner, it was very simple.
The main thing is not to forget in the cloner include the function - render instance.
Corona 1.7/ DalyBuild/  May 15 2017
Win10 / Cinema R18.048 
CPU 5820K /  Ram 32 GB - The scene used 12.7 GB
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now this is probably a Mac version problem, but I think you need to try the latest daily build.
Previously, there were the same problems, the scene consumed all the memory and the system hovered. Now everything works even better than in 3DMax
The Render Legion team did a good job! Thank you guys, you are great.

[zbieraj]

Nope. Last version is handling huge amount of greenery way worse...

And I am talking about way bigger areas of grass ;) (like I did here for my diploma).

[rojharris]

Probably an obvious point but you have remembered to check the 'render instances' checkbox? Its there in all these utilities, mograph, forrester, surfacespread etc. and makes a HUGE difference

[zbieraj]

I am always rendering instances.

[vianney]

I test surface spread, it isn't better than mograph.
the render time is enormous
cdt

c4d R15
corona B1 17 may 2017

[Eddoron]

I create LOD meshes for things farther away from the camera.
I once found a freebie of a grass patch which alone demanded about 12 or 16gigs of ram...just the patch.
I rarely do animation, so camera movement is less of a concern for me but with proper placement, culling and maybe a small script to switch meshes when higher quality meshes are necessary should be manageable and speed up the process a lot.
For stills, it's often easier to compose the image.

[Nejc Kilar]

I think currently the biggest limitations stem from Cinema 4D itself - at least for the time being. I think this goes in line what @Rhodesy and some of the others have already said.

What I personally "struggle" with but still find manageable is the viewport FPS with many objects instanced. It requires careful planning if you want to undertake big projects with big scenes.

Layers and turned off cloners are something I do to have the viewport remain usable - hiding the nulls sometimes isn't enough. It can become less confusing if you keep all the scatter cloners in one null and then just enable them before you render. It also helps to work on a smaller grass surface in another scene and then you copy and paste it into the original one.

The bigger limitation imho is the Cloner / SurfaceSpread / Forester / etc... and their preparation times. Crude example but still, if I render 100.000 1mil poly trees with Corona Scatter (in 3ds Max) it takes like 10 seconds to prepare the scene and geometry. In C4D it takes like 1 minute.

That pretty much means that in one scenario I can work on exterior scenes using the IPR and in the other... Not so much :)

That said I am hoping some of these "problems" will be worked on in R19+ with the core rewrite.

Every software has its pros and cons... I mean there are very popular packages out there were you can't even scatter stuff non destructively without a plugin. Pros and cons :)

[zbieraj]

Not a lot have changed - Surface Spread, MoGraph and MultiCloner are not giving the best results.

[Nejc Kilar]

@zbieraj,

Multi-instances in R20 will probably solve most of your problems :) Check the cineversity videos.