Author Topic: Instancing with Forest Pack and Rail Clone  (Read 9524 times)

2017-07-27, 19:28:12

Jens

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Hi guys

I've gone through the boards here and over at iToo's forum.

Can someone clarify what the status is on getting instancing to work with iToo's plugins?

On their boards they say you guys have been in contact, but the ball is currently on the Corona Devs' court. Here on the Corona forum it seems like you think the ball is on the iToo's court?

It's a big time waster not being able to use the instancing mode on RC and FP. Lots of extra tweaks has to be done to get the plugins and presets to work as they as they do with vray.

I don't know if it's related, but I'm also experiencing very large slow downs on render starts in scenes with heavy FP and RC items. "transforming vertices" "parsing scene" takes ages, but once the rendering starts, all is pretty fast.
« Last Edit: 2018-10-19, 14:23:02 by maru »
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2017-07-27, 19:57:30
Reply #1

Ondra

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can you elaborate, maybe post screenshots or scene? Railclone and forestpack are indeed parsed into instances...
Rendering is magic.How to get minidumps for crashed/frozen 3ds Max | Sorry for short replies, brief responses = more time to develop Corona ;)

2017-07-27, 20:49:13
Reply #2

Jens

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Should have rephrased topic to Railclone only. Forgot edge mode in Forestpack has been working for some time :)

Railclone seems to still have limits when working in Corona (vs vray). Especially with randomization. It simply doesn't work.

It's nice now with the new Corona multimap and the UVW randomizer as I can now do a work around, but it still doesn't work when enabling instancing in Railclone.

See attached for a small example.
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2017-07-27, 21:01:52
Reply #3

Jens

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Since randomizing won't work when enabling instancing, I had a feeling that it had a big impact on why my renders were taking so long to start in "heavy" Railclone scenes.

Just made a quick test to see if the instancing had an effect. (only with a small sample of RC object isolated, but clearly there it is causing extra parsing time). See attached.

In my full scene and at only 1800px (test render) I'm waiting over 1min for it to parse. It's not really a problem for the final render that takes much longer anyway, but for test renders it's a huge pain.
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2017-07-27, 21:02:43
Reply #4

Bzuco

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I don't know if it's related, but I'm also experiencing very large slow downs on render starts in scenes with heavy FP and RC items. "transforming vertices" "parsing scene" takes ages, but once the rendering starts, all is pretty fast.
ForestPack: Try to avoid using object exclude areas with high resolution and also if you are using spline exclude/include areas keep those splines with smallest vertex count as possible(use normalize spline modifier for example)...then you will see speed up in transforming vertices pass.

2017-08-01, 14:55:44
Reply #5

Jens

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ForestPack: Try to avoid using object exclude areas with high resolution and also if you are using spline exclude/include areas keep those splines with smallest vertex count as possible(use normalize spline modifier for example)...then you will see speed up in transforming vertices pass.

Sadly this isn't something I can apply to my scene as it my exclude splines are indeed very simple (4-10vertices). I'm still pretty sure it's the missing support of "instancing". Very noticeably in this case as I'm doing large building facades with custom tiles and wood cladding.
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2017-08-02, 07:51:34
Reply #6

Lucutus

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We have faced the same issues here. Recently we had a really huge scene to render and in this scene the randomization feature of RC was essential. Unfortunately it was impossible to render the scene with the instancing turned off, because of the memory consumption (it tk the whole available memory (64GB) and then crashed.

The only workaround was to use the Railclone Tools and instanciate the whole RC object before rendering.

Greetz

Lucutus

2017-08-08, 09:23:13
Reply #7

maru

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Recap of this thread:
Railclone:
1) Instancing on - works as expected, parsing is faster, there is an issue with randomizing.
2) Instancing off- works as expected
3) Randomizing does not work when instancing is enabled - using Corona Multi Map

Jens, could you contact us about this at support@corona-renderer.com with a very simple scene demonstrating this? It could be even a scene like in your screenshots, with some boxes scattered around.

If there are some other issues with Railclone or other iToo plugins, please also report them at support@, but one issue per one separate email please.
Marcin Miodek | chaos-corona.com
3D Support Team Lead - Corona | contact us

2017-08-08, 11:17:18
Reply #8

Jens

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Recap of this thread:
Railclone:
1) Instancing on - works as expected, parsing is faster, there is an issue with randomizing.
2) Instancing off- works as expected
3) Randomizing does not work when instancing is enabled - using Corona Multi Map

Jens, could you contact us about this at support@corona-renderer.com with a very simple scene demonstrating this? It could be even a scene like in your screenshots, with some boxes scattered around.

If there are some other issues with Railclone or other iToo plugins, please also report them at support@, but one issue per one separate email please.

Done.

It's a general problem that Corona doesn't seem to recognize the way RC "manipulates" the instances with it's "Instancing engine". Neither random mat IDs or UVW offsets nodes work. Corona only sees the scattered object as the exact same instance, hence no randomization will occur. So the new Corona UVW randomizer doesn't work either. - Unless we turn the instancing engine off, but that comes with the drawbacks listed above.
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2017-08-08, 11:50:54
Reply #9

maru

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Thanks!
Marcin Miodek | chaos-corona.com
3D Support Team Lead - Corona | contact us

2017-08-08, 11:57:38
Reply #10

maru

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2017-10-07, 10:11:51
Reply #11

Jens

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Is this something that will be partially possible to do in 1.8 roadmap with the "Multimap - randomization by mesh elements"?

If so, I hope it won't continue it's implementation ETA from 1.6->1.7->1.8->1.9 ;)
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2018-11-29, 14:32:37
Reply #12

Rhodesy

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Has any of this been looked at yet? Ive found the same issues but Im not sure if im doing something wrong. Thanks

2018-11-30, 15:39:59
Reply #13

maru

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We will look into this again.
Now we have the "randomize by mesh element option", so hopefully it will help.
Marcin Miodek | chaos-corona.com
3D Support Team Lead - Corona | contact us

2019-03-07, 11:12:59
Reply #14

Ink Visual

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Hi guys.
Is there any chance this might be resolved in the nearest future?
I tested RailClone recently mainly with an intention to use it to create more complicated floor tiling patterns, but without Corona understanding how RC assigns IDs to its objects it doesn't make sense to invest in it.
Thanks,
Michal