just so you know... athens was a fraction of what we rendered for elysium. so... i think you guys should be aiming high... i mean REALLY high. if i don't see a billion somewhere (instancing is fine) then i am still not convinced the gpu renderer has overcome the memory limitations.
but it sounds like the scene you describe is a beast... can't wait to see it! On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 1:48 PM, Tim Crowson <tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com > wrote: > Andreas, > > I'm working on a project now (can't post any renders though...) that > involves a pretty large outdoor environment (not as big as the WT's Athens > demo... maybe 1/4th of that). I'm instancing grass clumps *everywhere*, > and I have 11-12 Tree prototypes being scattered as proxies, each between > 500,000 and 1.5M polys. The enviro is basically surrounded by a forest. > Also have some extra scattered instances of undergrowth, bushes, shrubs, > flowers. Some static ivy meshes which are very dense as well... the master > scene from which I break out and publish assets contains about 15M raw > polygons, excluding the proxies... When I render, XSI hangs up for a minute > or two, not exactly sure what it's doing... then Redshift kicks in and > takes another 2-3 min to export the scene, process shaders/textures, then > renders a 1920x1080 frame (using full Monte Carlo only in my case) in about > 20-30min, depending on what's in the frame. We have a triple-Titan box for > testing and it does it in about 2.4x that. Redshift is excellent at caching > anything it can, so it's fairly easy to iterate over local changes. > > To be clear, when Redshift goes out-of-core, it goes *into *your system > ram. So in the end, you still need plenty of system ram for large scenes. > But I've only got 20GB in my workstation and I'm getting very complex > renders out of it without coming even close to that. More in the 6-8GB > range so far. Proxies are awesome, and Redshift wisely had those from day > one of the alpha. > > Now several months ago I rendered > this<http://timcrowson.smugmug.com/photos/i-qGFB7nv/1/O/i-qGFB7nv.jpg>, > but it's more along the lines of what Octavian posted. It's just one tree > instanced a bunch of times. This rendered in about 30min at that > resolution, on a GTX470. > > -Tim > >
