[eric nixon]

Disp not working with instances, mw 3.01.1



Left with instances, right withou... which is looking good, but its too slow to use.

I dont know if this has been discused, or if this is a plugin issue, but certainly doesnt work ....any help?

Ignore the task manager, just included it to point out the benefit of getting this to work, which is obvious..

[JDHill]

I don't see how the plugin could change the behavior of a material based on whether it was used on an instance, and I haven't yet reproduced the described behavior here. Please first ensure you are using the latest versions of Maxwell and the plugin (from here), and if the behavior persists, then please upload a Cinema file that demonstrates it, along with any mxms and textures the file references.

[eric nixon]

I now have 3.013 installed and the problem remains, but looking at the release notes it seems closely related to recent work, i.e. its not a plugin problem.

This is just a test image, but can you please give me some advice about the recommended workflow for c4d hair;



To get this render I had to turn on generate -> spline, but this really bogs down the viewport - I can see no way to turn off the display of all hairs, unless I filter all splines but that doesn't help anyway. At least the preroll time is still very slow, and ofcourse I need many more hairs to get a good effect.

I wanted to use hair, at least for a few areas of the ground so that they interact with other objects, as you can just about see in the render.

[JDHill]

There are too many possible variables in Cinema to be able to make any comment on how a particular setup might work, or not work. However, it should not be necessary to use Generate > Spline (or anything else), unless an unknown factor is in play; the number of hairs exported is principally controlled by parameters in the Hair Object's Hair tab (i.e. Count, Clone).

[eric nixon]

Thanks, great help, I had forgotten about the clone setting, Its working now, I need to find more optimal settings though, in this test image its using 15gb of ram, and voxelization is too slow. I think the mw hair extension is wasting resources... dodgy spanish coding



edit; Now I'm using 4000 guides, and 100 clones, but how many hairs should I specify, also 4000 perhaps - why have this number???, sorry I find c4d hair really confusing. And generally feeling stupid today...

[eric nixon]

The memory usage was because I forgot to turn the instances back on, my bad,..... spanish coding is pardonned.. briefly

Now I'm using about 2 gig inc 5step MB, i tried to enable culling in c4d for the distant hairs, but I dont think that maxwell reads that input. Here is a render;

sl11 20mins (need to optimize materials a bit)

[JDHill]

i tried to enable culling in c4d for the distant hairs, but I dont think that maxwell reads that input.

How it works is that the plugin asks the Cinema Hair object to generate the hair (vector) data; apparently it does not generate according to the culling settings. Perhaps interestingly, though, I find that it does respect the Hairs >Growth > Density map, so that may be another way of handling it.

[eric nixon]

Yes, the image above uses density, with a broad noise in that slot.

I think that rendering grass is always quite slow because of its shape, and theres no workaround for that, so maybe a few small patches of grass will suffice.

My workflow logic now is thus;

guides: as few as possible to capture the dynamic scene interactions.
Hairs: as few as possible to keep the overall shape defined by the guides, (typically 2-3 hairs per guide)
clones: enough to fill out the visual effect (depends on the density of the hairs).

Whaddya think?

[JDHill]

What I meant was that you could use a gradient in the density map (multiplying by your noise map in this case, I guess) to work around culling having no effect. As far as rendering speed, just remember that the flat primitive type will be the quickest, as will increasing the number of segments (to a certain point, and likely not as importantly with a grass-like hair, than with long hair strands), albeit both at the expense of memory consumption. Even if you are technically using hair to generate grass, most of what is stated in the Maxwell Grass docs will apply.

Regarding your specific workflow, I would need to do a lot of testing before I could have much of an opinion, since when it comes to generating the hair data, you're completely in Cinema's realm, where there are about a million ways to do something.

[eric nixon]

Ah, yes gradient map, good idea.

I had a few strange crashes this morning, it wouldnt render last nights file whatever I tried... which is weird.
Cinema was frequently hanging at the 'generating x,000 hairs' stage, although the crash could be the subsequent operation, (not sure what that would be). Also mxcl was hanging immediately. I changed several things and it was all good again. One of the changes I made was adding a floor object so that some of the rocks dont end up flying thru space miles below... maybe that was the issue.

mxcl was reporting the grass extension as the crash culprit.

I submitted an automated report.

[eric nixon]

Hi me again, I just tried to use c4dhair with instances (in hair you can choose to generate instances, I didnt apply a maxwell hair-tag because I want to render the instances. It rendered... but not as instances). Would be nice if auto-generate worked with this.

Thanks.

[JDHill]

There isn't anything for the Auto-generate Instances function to identify and replace with instances in this case, since as you'll see if you look at the MXS in Studio, Cinema puts all of the generated "instances" into a single mesh.

[eric nixon]

Yes your right, its deforming the meshes along the hair splines, so they're not instances any more..

[eric nixon]

Hi, I seem to be getting that crash again (c4d hangs after generating grass, just when the exporter exports) It appears to happen when 'set roots' is enabled for the clones.

Btw getting really fast renders now using the cylinder hair mode and a simple opaque material, this 4 mins sl12 with MB.



I was thinking that maybe maxwell prefers to render solid shapes, with thin blades being slower, (as well as being slow from using thin-sss).