Standins

[julius]

Hi all,

I did some tests sometime ago with standins in Softimage, and saw that MR wasn't able to do as good as Vray in this area.
But I saw this :

http://vimeo.com/user5189092

50 000 trees (3 types)
type1 = 487 926 triangles
type2 = 816 872 triangles
type3 = 552 827 triangles
more than 25 000 000 000 triangles
1280 X 720
render time +/- 10 minutes with motion blur in 3dsmax and MR 3.11

(original post : here)

I'm more than surprised, because when I try to do the same with standins, 4000 standins overfill my 12 Go of RAM (even with memory limit set to 7000), and softimage freeze...

What do you think ? Is there a bug with softimage and memory management compared to 3dsmax ?

[julius]

So nobody experienced standins with huge amount of geometry like this ?

[julca]

Hello Julius,

This is a moment that I did not use mental ray but if I can help...

Is it a texture that control the transparency of leaves ?
This can make a big difference in terms of computing resource.

[julius]

Thanks for your reply Julca,

yes it is. I know that it should be better with no transparency, but why does MR not respect the memory limit ?

I'll try with an other model, without transparency.

[julca]

Did you try with raytracing instead of scanline ?

[Kzin]

standins are broken in si since version 2013, perhaps since 2012. the geometry is duplicated in memory instead of instanced. it worked in mr standalone btw.

[julius]

Have you got an official answer about that ?!!
If it's the case, shame on Autodesk ! how can they let a such important feature broken !!?

[Tekano]

so you are on MR 3.11 yes? and how are you exporting your standins? have you tried instances?

and @kzin which bit is broke - the whole thing?

Previously over 2 years ago Ive done some testing with standins with stadium crowds and several different medium (with hair) to low res characters with Mental Ray against Arnold and once the standins are setup correctly they are pretty comparable in render times.

its just setting up the standins is confusing and prone to errors in MR - ie would not render or consume all ram then fail wereas in Arnold its a lot less error prone.

here is the thread from the softimage list where I was bitching about it and my solution was a differnt version of XSI and being super careful with testing each standin for potential memory errors so it *did* work its just painful

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searc ... llzuMD2iAJ

[Kzin]

its a known bug in si for version 2012 and 2013, not sure if it was fixed in 2014 sp2. its an integration bug which was already in 2010 i think, fixed in 2011 but again in 2012 and up.

[Kzin]

how can they let a such important feature broken !!?

the important thing is that more and more people MUST write mails to ad, if they are not in beta, when they found such a bug.
ad needs feedback from the users here.

[julius]

Yes, I'm with MR 3.11
And no, I didn't try export with instances.

I'll make some more tests and give a feedback.