HD_instance fun tests

[JML]

between projects, I decided to do that for fun to show an example of what HDinstance can do..

both images are rendered 1024*683 at enlow with raytrace shadow on
it took 8minute for the first one and 7 for the other
(on P4 3ghz)

there are 16 641 cars,
each car is 69 178 polys
total of 1 151 191 098 polygons

[Matt]

Whoah! That's what I call a carpark! Bummer if you're parked in the middle! :D

[Para]

I dare you to render that with radiosity (assuming hd_instance supports it) with all the raytracing options on! :D

[kopperdrake]

WOH!!! With parking like that it's definately not England :D

I guess it's completely pointless me asking what the speed difference in rendering with and without HD Instance is in this case as I'd imagine that LW would just cough its guts up being loaded with those kinds of polys without HD Instance :)

But, does anyone know what kind of performance hit HDI has on a typical scene?

I think I'm going to be budgeting in for HDI and some more of lowpolygon3D's characters next month :) I also need to get into animating characters - any recommendations? I'd like to buy some of the T-pose characters from lowpolygon3D and a-xyz and produce simple animations either by hand or by using mocap data. Any suggestions? (Sorry for hijacking the thread).

Dunk

[GregMalick]

JML,
I thought I heard somewhere that HDinstance has a problem with LW8. Or maybe it's 8.2 or am I thinking of some other product? :confused:

[ravantra]

Where did I park my car?
Wondering what the time would be with area lights and radiosity?

Cool Test.

[prospector]

If you want me on your car lot
give me color choices and some 2 tones and some convertibles
1 color cars

Sheesh, Henry Ford did that back in the oughts.
Any color you wanted as long as it was black.

other than that....cool test :D

[JML]

thanks everybody,

it's funny, when I look at it, it looks like there are more than 16000 cars..
more like hundreds of thousands..

the following render has raytrace reflection (body,glass,etc.. have reflections)
it took 10 minute on the same machine.
(but tequilascream was working in the background, so the render should actually be faster than 10m)
not bad I think..

I think only montecarlo radiosity works with HDinstance, I tried it at low resolution and it seem to render 4 time slower than the render with reflection..

HDinstance had problem with LW8.0.1, it works fine on 8.2 (and also 8.0 too I think)

it would be impossible to render that in LW by itself.. unless you have LW64 and
like 1000 Gbs of ram...

on the marketing side of LW , if newtek would buy HD_instance, they could say that
LW can render now billions of polygons with very small amount of memory..

[JML]

okay, just for you prospector, I'll try to add more cars and more colors tomorrow.
(I have the cars ready from other projects, I just need to bring them in the scene file..)
I'm curious to see how it's going to look like..

[vpii]

I think you can just add under surface and shaders the instance shader to just the body of the car to get differnt colors.

[trick]

I love HDInstance, but I really would like some more options since even E-on software can do something like this (http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Products/vue5infinite/) with its new Ecosystem Technology

[vpii]

My jaw dropped when I saw that animation on vue site of that city fly over.

[prospector]

Yea, that was like...HOLY CRAP!!!

[pixym]

Hi JML,

I seriously consider buying HD Instance for Archi Viz, but I have tried the demo, and I have not found no way to excluse radiosity from HD geometry lighting.

Can you give me a tip or if this is possible for the full version?

Best

[JML]

I'm not an expert with HDinstance, but I don't think it's possible to
exclude hdinstance objects from radiosity or lights..
hopefully the next version will fix that but right now I think you can't..

[pixym]

JML,

Thank for the reply

Best

[robk]

Trick

after seeing your message below I downloaded the Vue 5 demo

I love HDInstance, but I really would like some more options since even E-on software can do something like this with its new Ecosystem Technology
__________________
Your FIRST impression NEVER gets a SECOND chance !!!!

After trying it (and getting frustrated for a hour or so) I e-mailed EON to comment on their product. I'm not sure if it was because it was a demo or what but it was about the flakiest software I have encountered in a long time. I tried to import dxf and lwo files from previous projects I had completed and Vue hung up about 80% of the time. When a file does import it gets represented by a bounding box which makes it very difficult to line up your camera. many times when file did import and you did a quick test render only about 20% of the file was actually there. Probably if I researched the help files a bit more I might be able to get more out of it but after the software hangs up on you about 20 times you tend to give up.
They have a great presentation of their new Vue 5 Infinite and the sample renderings and animations are beautiful but unless it works a lot better than the Vue 5 Demo I wouldn't waste my time. There is no sense saying you have import support for all these formats (dxf and Lwo on my part) and they don't work.

Rob K

[Dodgy]

I'm not an expert with HDinstance, but I don't think it's possible to
exclude hdinstance objects from radiosity or lights..
hopefully the next version will fix that but right now I think you can't..

With version 1.7 you can exclude lights, I don't think it'll be too much longer before you can exclude radiosity.

[vpii]

Since this is a instance thread, thought I would post some wip using all instance for high poly trees.

[JML]

very nice, how many polys would that be ?

[vpii]

How do I find out how many poly count if you counted all the instance's, is there a way? statistics just tells how many before. Here is a wire of the scene.

[Dodgy]

That's a lot of bushes....

[vpii]

good old spray points, I dont know what I would do without it.

[prospector]

maby take the amount of polys in the base model, then multiply by the amount of points that model will go to.

[vpii]

I just found out having to go back and render a scene with instance trees that it does not remember if you use random rotation and size. every time you load the scene a new random rotation and size will be given. That kind of sucks not to lock that in. I just wanted to do a limited region to match and I can not now. Anyone else seen this?

[trick]

...every time you load the scene a new random rotation and size will be given...

I don't have the time to check this with the latest version, but don't want these kind of surprises when I'm starting to render my current project. Have you contacted HD about this ?

[kopperdrake]

Oh that doesn't sound good :confused: I pretty much always have to reload a scene to render sequences overnight so that would stop me from using HDInstance in many cases.

[prospector]

Yea...
ya can't render 100 frames of a 300 frame anim, have a crash, restart at frame it crashed, and have all the trees and bushes at a different rotation.

[JML]

that's kind of scary, especially when I'm about to render all my anims this week-end..
are you guys sure about this ?

I splited some high-rez still and rendered it on 10 nodes on other machines, and there was no problems putting all the splits back...(all the trees were the same shape)

I rendered 2 time the same still after reloading the scene on the same computer , and the trees rendered the same..

must be something with your scene vpii I guess..

I'm going to send an animation on the nodes to see if the trees renders fine..
just to make sure again.

[vpii]

Thats why I wanted you guys to verify this. Did you have random rotation on your trees? Mine are set min at 0 and max at 360. I might just be my machine and maybe a duel issue. I also did a limited region render. I don't know if that should matter.

[vpii]

False alarm guys this is what happend. I was using points for placements for the trees. I needed to take a few out. I sent the points to modeler deleted a few points to take a few trees out, sent it back to layout and that is where it sets up a differnt rotation with less points now. So be warned never to add or take away or this will happen.

[JML]

I rendered an animations with trees on 10 nodes,
(so 10 nodes loading the same scene with HD_instance)
and the trees were rendering fine when I played the animation.

I'm using 1.6.5 , what version are you guys using ?

(and my trees are set to random rotation)

[JML]

False alarm guys this is what happend. I was using points for placements for the trees. I needed to take a few out. I sent the points to modeler deleted a few points to take a few trees out, sent it back to layout and that is where it sets up a differnt rotation with less points now. So be warned never to add or take away or this will happen.

yep , that's normal.
you scared a lot of people, including me :)

[vpii]

Sorry again for the panic, I feel like chicken licken, turkey lurkey, drakey lakey,dukey luckey off to tell the king the sky is falling. sorry again.

[prospector]

JML..can you take one of the cars in the middle out for a test drive?
as in can you animate them individually?

[JML]

not the way I did it..
I built a plane then subdivided it then assigned a car for each poly with hd instance.
right now, when you select the plane, it select all the hd_instance cars (because the plane is on 1 layer)
to move each car, you would need to have each polygon of this plane on seperate layer.
you also can do the same thing with points so I guess you could create the points in modeller and do what you can in layout.. depending on what you want to do..

[prospector]

ouch..that can become quite complicated in your case or with an army of robots.

[duke]

You could have all the cars driving around - you'd do that by animated the base car. However you still cannot set an animation offset so the animations all play at the same time (although with something like swaying foliage this is barely noticeable with the random rotation/scaling). Another thing you can do is to seperate the points you want to clone the instances on and make a morph map or two for them which would move the clones around in layout, or you could use one of those plugins to move/animate the points in layout.

[duke]

I'd also like to add that Graham's support (the plugin maker guy) is phenomenal. Back when it was 1.3 we were working on a really heavy foliage/landscape scene and needed a few features, so I shot off an email to Graham and was sent back a beta build. A few weeks ago I asked Graham if he could make the instances recognise the matte object flag and the next morning I had a beta build :)

[Dodgy]

I'll second that, I asked for the radiosity flag for an object to be obeyed on the instance and lo, it was done. Really useful guy! Just wish NT would hire him since he knows his way around the volumetric stuff :)

[pixym]

...I think only montecarlo radiosity works with HDinstance, I tried it at low resolution and it seem to render 4 time slower than the render with reflection..
.../...
it would be impossible to render that in LW by itself.. unless you have LW64 and
like 1000 Gbs of ram...

on the marketing side of LW , if newtek would buy HD_instance, they could say that
LW can render now billions of polygons with very small amount of memory..

I think NT should have made some deal with Happy digital to have this wonderfull tool in the LW9 features list... But perhaps it will be useless with LW 9 64 bits version, I do not know...

[Roux]

I always set up the hdinstance and then save the scene. Render a frame and save the scene. nce settings to a file on your hard drive for use when you call it up later.
Sounds like your machine crashed without the scene having been saved after hd_instance was applied or before the file was written??

[Dodgy]

I've just tried a fairly simple scene of textured balls, using interpolated radiosity, and the HD_instance render came out at 1m54, to the equivalent LW FX_linker render of 1m29, so it obviously does depend on the type of objects you're rendering as to the speed difference. I did render some trees imported from vue, and 5 million polys rendered at something like 2 minutes (no radiosity). So it's not horrifically slow. The best thing is you could bake radiosity into a texture, then instance it and turn off radiosity for that object. And it would be a lot easier to manage than FXlinked stuff...

[Roux]

Has anyone got HD Instance 1.7 working with LW 8.3? I just got to the vegetation part of my project and .....nothing in the render although HD instance is there and everything looks ok up till the render.

[JML]

well I'm still using 1.6.5beta.., and it works fine with 8.3..

are you sure you did not forget to add it in the volumetric panel ?

[Dodgy]

All HDinstances work with all versions of LW as far as I know.

[Roux]

well I'm still using 1.6.5beta.., and it works fine with 8.3..

are you sure you did not forget to add it in the volumetric panel ?

It's there and even looks like it's rendering but nothing is rendered.
I even loaded up a couple of old scenes that I know were working on 1.6 and the same problem.

Sounds too weird. At least if you guys have it working, I know it's something else. I will try something else now.

Thanks for the info.

[3dworks]

and i'm still waiting for the OSX version... it's a long time ago that they promised it! i received an email in january from graham promising a fast port. then in june the porting was still going on (and being 'not easy')... but i had no signs about the OSX version anymore, lately.

cheers

markus

[vpii]

Is it just me or does HD instance seem a little slower in 8.5. Anyone have comparitive times?

[nthused]

If it is...it's not noticable on my system. I seem to be having memory issues and need A LOT of segments to render...funny considering I've got 4 GB to work with (well...2GB with LW32)... But I've got VERY big images that I'm rendering too.
Seems to be rendering quickly with the segments and Radiosity enabled.

Have you downloaded the latest update to HDI? Think it's 1.7.1

[vpii]

I did get the latest patch, just seems to go to a crawl on some renders. Maybe I just have not used it for a while. With the lack of speed of Lightwave render and HD instance it is hard to beat Fprime. I just wish Fprime and HDI worked with each other. I am getting tired or work arounds or having to do without say a HDI render because of compatibility. I hope that 9 lives up to the speed that is needed to run this plugin.

[nthused]

I know EXACTLY what you mean...Everything crawls after using FPrime.