Softimage 2012 Experiences

[luceric]

We're investigating this rendering startup delay

[Rez007]

We're investigating this rendering startup delay

Thanks for letting us know that you guys are looking into it.

[Hirazi Blue]

I've moved the posts about MoRbIdBoY's installation woes to their own thread:
install problems SI2012 fresh install
;)

[rray]

Thanks for looking into the delay thing - Btw, I noticed that 3Delight free version has the same rendering delay in 2012 compared to 2011.

[Maximus]

i've got a lots of errors on .tiff files for some reason, anyone happened to see them? I get lots of this

' WARNING : IMG 0.2 warn 102023: TIFFReadDirectory: ...plants\grass\psdFiles\leaf.tif: unknown field with tag 37724 (0x935c) encountered.

this happens at render times, on script editor, it seems a .tiff file problem? i've always used those textures in the past tho!
btw i'm speaking about soft2012!

thanks

[ActionArt]

Yes, I saw that too. I haven't checked yet but are they compressed in any way (LZ, Zip etc)?

[Maximus]

Hm here is a weird thing..
I've noticed that this delay issue doesnt happen when using ICE instances, at first glance i thought that the problem would be the amount of geometry in the scene, since i've used 200 spheres and in that scene Soft hangs, but i was doing some ICE tests and i forgot i had Mental Ray set as engine since i was working with hardware render, and it just started rendering normal.

Here is the render, it is made with 150.000 point cloud grass strands + 5000 instanced objects (there are 4 models totals randomized)

It didnt hang after i hit render, and the whole picture took 20 minutes to render (i have a Q6600 cpu).



Again it appears to hang only if using geometry not involving ICE wich is weird


@actionart yeah sorry i double checked it and was the compression that caused trouble:) thanks!

[origin]

it doesn't hang if you use standins also

[Saturn]

that because it doesn't have to translate the scene.

that said if you use the ICE instancer the first thing done is to translate the instance as a stand in.
If you look to the log you could see that a standin is created.

[McNistor]

Nice grass render you got in there Maximus.
i just hate how Mray doesn't do "deep" shadows like 3delight for example.

[Maximus]

no idea what are deep shadows, this render took 20 minutes on my pc wich well..its really amazing, last scene i tried with grass and some flowers took over 3 hours, this scene has FG and raytrace shadows, also the memory usage was pretty low compared to old scenes and old Mental Ray, i'm the first who bash MR but when they do good stuff, well i appreciate it!

back to topic..does anyone know when this mental ray issue will get fixed, is there any ETA? i hope we wont have to wait 4 months for this problem to be fixed..its pretty annoying not using Mental Ray with this release..

[McNistor]

Don't think about something technical like "area" or "shadow map"

I'm referring to the fact that 3delight for example does a little more occlusion (without an occlusion shader or comp) at the base of the hair/grass and realism is a little better.
The same hair-ball (hair on a sphere) looks more realistic to me when rendered with 3delight.
Or maybe I'm just seeing things.

[origin]

as for grass, I prefer to do it brute-force-vray-way ;) that is, instancing patches of modeled grass
it seems standins are okay for this (memory wise) 3,800,000,000 polys and 2gb ram used:

[Maximus]

did you instanced Standin with ICE? few times i've used stand-ins i had a bit of trouble positioning the object i wanted, because for example using a tree as stand in it does a too aproximative shape and most of the time the foliage and branch hurts stuff because i cant really see how is positioned untill i actually render.

Never tried to instance standins tho, but as Saturn said since ICE instancing creates basically standins at render time, isnt kinda the same thing what you did and what i did? Just to understand!

can you show me the ICE tree please?

[origin]

I instanced regular geometry, because as your wrote, ice is writing standin file when using Instance shape. So instancing standins in icetree doesn't make much sense (?)

edit: now when I'm thinking about this, I remember having problems with Set instance geometry node, which 100% used standins, and this caused massive memory problems. So maybe Instance shape ain't standin after all...

[Mathaeus]

Never tried to instance standins tho, but as Saturn said since ICE instancing creates basically standins at render time, isnt kinda the same thing what you did and what i did? Just to understand!

If it's the same as in previous version of SI and ICE (if...), there are two ways: stand-ins if you have a ShapeInstanceTime attribute (or something like this name), somewhere in ICE tree.
Mentioned attribute is in compounds, like 'control instance animation', and few others.
If you're using just a 'instance shape' node (get data>....), that's a good old (stable and fast) way of instancing - no stand-ins.
If there is a something different in 2012, I would be interested to know.