Hey guys thanks a bunch!
Yes, make sure to have the just new 2.0.7 version!
Quote:
Originally Posted by AdamAvenali
i think i may have broken the scene  haha
i downloaded your file and then opened it and hit F9. my GI time was 16 min and my render is currently at 46 min and is only at 10%. i am on a Q6600. could it be that i told it to ignore the missing images when opening the file? |
Probably the version issue, the files should not matter at all...
Quote:
Originally Posted by geo_n
Thanks for the scene. It looks great!
How come your q6600 renders it in 7 min and it rendered in mine in 12min? Did yo overclock?
Also what was the workaround with the weightmaps? Never encountered that. |
On the rendertime: my sig is not correct anymore, I have a i7 920 now as my main which is not overclocked btw. My previous Q6700 was overclocked to 3.4 ghz and would probably be slightly faster (not sure, these i7's sure are nice). The weightmap problem is that if you use more than 1 instancing layer in HDI and on top you use weightmaps to place them, they get messed up. The solution is to just clone the groundplane (make them invisible) and do 1 layer per clone instead of all on 1 groundplane. Graham seems to know this issue and will probably be able to fix it real soon. In the meantime doing it like this will work fine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by adk
... great grass and a great share Hieron. Thanks a bunch 
Played around with this and works like a treat & looks fantastic. Not sure you could actually speed it up too much (it looks quite optimised to me), as I'm not much of an authority on AA / GI optimisation. Only thing of note is the daisy flowers using transparency instead of clip maps. On a few it seems fine but if you have a lot of these it would slow down considerably from my experience.
I was actually going to post a few questions on the related topic of sampling / AA issues on scenes such as these where you have a lot of detail / polys squeezed into a few pixels in the distance & how to best handle such issues. Would be great if you could setup AA based on distance to camera but alas I think I dream too much. I wonder how others deal with this in animations where such heavy blurring might not be possible because of the need to preserve those details ? Any tips / hints would be greatly appreciated. |
On the transparancy: I believe that HDI does not see it if I use clipmaps on the object that will get instanced. I tried at least and moved to transparancy right away. If HDI does see clipmaps I'd switch it..
On the blurring: details in the distance are hard to preserve with so little pixels to show them I guess.. making them smooth is surely an issue though.. something MB did not fix at all. Therefore the NeatVideo plugin, it blurs in time (can do spatial too) and thus takes out the jittering.
It is just 1 blade of grass indeed, with a weightmap over it's length. I tried using HDI first to just clone the 1 blade, but it keeps crashing if I fill in a instance per meter of 1000000 :P (which is the *only* time I encountered any issue such as a crash or so, when filling in a bizarro number
)
So I did a "random point cloud" in modeler, scaled to 0 in y and used Point Clone on the blade to these points. That patch can then be used by HDI just fine and probably works better too. This is according to the tutorial btw.
The shot can probably be improved speedwise, since I noticed that the grass is a bit crowded when the weightmap on the ground is 100%. Dropping the 12 per meter to 8 or so should still work, but the area where weightmapping varies between clovers and grass then needs some attention. Since the animation is smooth, perhaps the GI settings can be lowered too.
I dropped this into a current project and under 1 minute I had grass working in it. Sure needs tweaking etc, but it copies over easily. Only issue is that the general GI settings govern the HDI. And then you have to set the object properties to tweak it for everything else in the scene.. doable though.
ps: the animation does some odd glitches (vague movement of the cube for instance), it is due to the DoF plugin I think, it sure is not in the render.
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