Hi there,
Been using cops, loving it, really nice to have this in houdini now.
One question though, i want to render out at 8k, I'm currently setting the default resolution on the copnet to 8192x8192 and the default pixel scale to 4 - that way i can work away in 1:4 proxy just fine and export out in the ropimage_output at 8k (changing to pixel scale 1).
Is that the correct method? Right now things bake out almost instantly in 4k but going to 8k destroys my machine and I'm yet to get an output without it crashing.
Machine spec is pretty beefy: rtx4090, 256gb ram, 64 core threadripper etc
Should I be doing things not on GPU for export? Is that an option?
Cheers!
Full Version: Best workflow to handle higher resolution
dnew
Is that the correct method?
Yep, that is the hope of having pixel scale.
A lot of people don't bother with pixel scale. If you don't specify anything in pixels (which is pretty much the default of most nodes) you can just set your default res to 1k or 2k, and use that to adjust your resolution.
dnew
Right now things bake out almost instantly in 4k but going to 8k destroys my machine and I'm yet to get an output without it crashing.
Frustrating!
It isn't meant to crash, just become very slow if you run out of memory. Are you running out of physical ram / swap before it crashes? By crash do you mean Houdini goes away, or do you mean you start getting red flags?
If you are on Windows you may have some luck being more conservative with Video Ram in Edit::Copernicus Settings. The Video Ram defaults to 100, we will page when we run out, but Windows will itself start paging, resulting in triple-swapping. Dropping this down to 50 or even 12 should keep the video card from filling up. However, we'll continue to use normal RAM, so if that is what you are running out of it won't help.
Turning of the GPU won't help you if you are running out of normal RAM, and will completely cripple performance, so usually isn't a good option. (This made more sense before 21, but in 21 we now should be swapping properly)
Dropping the vram to 50 solved it! Even going up to 16k now without issues.
I do however have a follow-up question. It seems like going from 4k-16k I'm not actually seeing any quality difference to the content, its just being saved out in a higher resolution.
Am I missing something here? Setup wise its mostly just fractal noise / bake geometry textures / triplanar projection.
Looking into the graph I can see the noise improving in resolution, so I was wondering if the geometrytextures or triplanar was the issue. I've noticed on the bakegemoetrytextures that changing resolution seems to have a drastic effect on the output:
4k:
8k:
Maybe this is causing an issue to some degree, or maybe its just a display issue going above 4k?
I do however have a follow-up question. It seems like going from 4k-16k I'm not actually seeing any quality difference to the content, its just being saved out in a higher resolution.
Am I missing something here? Setup wise its mostly just fractal noise / bake geometry textures / triplanar projection.
Looking into the graph I can see the noise improving in resolution, so I was wondering if the geometrytextures or triplanar was the issue. I've noticed on the bakegemoetrytextures that changing resolution seems to have a drastic effect on the output:
4k:
8k:
Maybe this is causing an issue to some degree, or maybe its just a display issue going above 4k?
Glad to hear the 50% worked around this.
That baked geometry texture looks very suspicious, if that was the output and not a display issue, I'd expect things to be massively wrong not just de-ressed...
Cropping or saving the output should let you see if it is a display issue.
For the lack of improved quality, there could be various things... First make sure you haven't switched to 16 bit precision to save memory. 16 bit floats only have 1024 different grey levels so when you use them for things like positions in fractal noise they'll start to quantize and stop improving. This is what led us to change our defaults to 32 bit everywhere, so unless you fiddled, it should be 32 bit. (But you had memory issues so may have fiddled :>)
There could also be precision problems even with 32bit, but for most stuff you have 16million shades of grey with 32 bit so you should be safe for a "mere" 16k.
That baked geometry texture looks very suspicious, if that was the output and not a display issue, I'd expect things to be massively wrong not just de-ressed...
Cropping or saving the output should let you see if it is a display issue.
For the lack of improved quality, there could be various things... First make sure you haven't switched to 16 bit precision to save memory. 16 bit floats only have 1024 different grey levels so when you use them for things like positions in fractal noise they'll start to quantize and stop improving. This is what led us to change our defaults to 32 bit everywhere, so unless you fiddled, it should be 32 bit. (But you had memory issues so may have fiddled :>)
There could also be precision problems even with 32bit, but for most stuff you have 16million shades of grey with 32 bit so you should be safe for a "mere" 16k.
Ah yes, i was fiddling indeed! I changed to 16 bit precision on everything but the displacement but I've put it back to 32 bit now. I'll see if that helps once I get past the next issue.
I've just set things up in a fresh scene, new nodes sopimport/baketexture nodes and getting the same issue as before, things are fine at 4k but break at 8k. Written out to disk and viewed in nuke*
8k
4k
The sopimport contains an alembic > convert to poly > transforms > output
Anything I may be missing here?
Cheers for the help so far
I've just set things up in a fresh scene, new nodes sopimport/baketexture nodes and getting the same issue as before, things are fine at 4k but break at 8k. Written out to disk and viewed in nuke*
8k
4k
The sopimport contains an alembic > convert to poly > transforms > output
Anything I may be missing here?
Cheers for the help so far
dnew
Anything I may be missing here?
I don't think so, if you can bundle this up, please submit a bug to support.