Good morning!
I got this L-system scene which as about a million polygon. It's actually a 72 frames animation of growing plants. Between frame 1 to 45, everything is ok, but then details start to appear and render eventually crashes due to lack of free memory.

I'm a bit surprised actually, I thought I would not have any problems rendering this which is not that big!

By the way, my system spec is this:
Pentium 4 3.2 ghz - 2gigs of ram
+ windows virtual memory is at max capacity: 4gigs

Now, I joined this scene to my post, I was wondering if someone could take a look at the scene and tell me what could be done to optimize my render settings and scene so I would be able to render it.

thanks very much!

Nice tree.

I've attached an altered version of your file.
I first split out each object into its own mantra render pass. Then I used an Instance object to render the trees. I don't have the stamp working but you should see that the render works fine. I ran it on a 4 year old laptop without problem.

I saved the file at frame 105, just hit the render button in the Rop network node and it will render each object and then spit out a composit for you.

Thanks man! Ill have a look at this setup…

Is it possible to have randomness of stamps with instances?

Would there be any render trick to actually render my scene as it originally was? Like playing with some memory options, or shading rate, or anything?

thanks again!

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1050&Itemid=216 [sidefx.com]

jrgauthier
Thanks man! Ill have a look at this setup…

Is it possible to have randomness of stamps with instances?

Would there be any render trick to actually render my scene as it originally was? Like playing with some memory options, or shading rate, or anything?

thanks again!

The problem is that you're producing huge, dense and at the same time spread across your scene, geometry. The bounding box of your vegetations object is roughly the same size as w whole scene - which is bad.

You could export it on disk (will take a while), and use delayed load procedural shader. But you really shouldn't. There are number of ways of optimizing such scene.

You could for example use Jason script from Exchange to turn your big geometry in a series of smaller objects. This script takes every group in source geo and creates new“ /obj/geo” from that,

Then one can try to render such scene or save objects on disk or render from files. Endless possibilities.

I don't think manta crashed during shading stage. You just forced it to load whole geometry at once since whole your scene is in one bounding box.

All very interesting people.

Thanks for the link arctor!

Symek: I think I understand what you are saying, so because all my Copied trees are in 1 object it's all calculated as one big dense, heavy block of geometry so it's hard to handle for Mantra…

That's really good to know but it bothers me a bit, I mean, isn't the point of having a copy sop is to be able to make a whole bunch of copies of your object? Now if you still have to split them after they are copied, it gets more complicated then I thought….Oh well…:roll: I guess I'll just have to get use to this!

you've answered your own question a little there….

isn't the point of having a copy sop is to be able to make a whole bunch of copies of your object?

you're using a copy SOP - this copies geometry - NOT objects…it's tricky but true

Arctor: I guess I did… I'm still discovering the wonders of Houdini here.

I read quickly the link you provided me, seems really interesting, I'll will definetly try to put to practice the technics explained in there…