[Polyxo]

I thought I would do a little benchmark scene to test the newly integrated geometry instancing functionality inside the Maxwell 1.7
plugin. For those who have not tried it yet: It works with Rhino Block objects and interprets them as just one one mesh object at render time, regardless of their count.

Setting up the scene was still quite tricky. Thousands of Instances don't need a lot of memory when the scene is idle. Selecting loads of block elements however eats up all available memory (and takes forever). View mainpulation got VERY slow too. These were pure Rhino issues, things did not change as I removed all plugin data.

As also the °Polycount° command made Windows run out of memory (2Gigs) I calculated the scene specs manually and its "theoretical poly-count:

9Rhinos*14Rhinos*20Rhinos = 2520 Rhinos
2520 Rhinos*48936Triangles= 123.318.720 total Triangles

Sending to Maxwell went smooth, the calculation started as quickly as one would expect with just one object in scene.
While this rendering of course everything but a beauty and still could need some clearing up it is remarkable how well the new release also deals with Subsurface-Scattering on hundreds of objects. I let it run
overnight on my Core2Duo 2.16 Laptop - nothing fancy.

Holger

[JDHill]

Cool Holger, here are a couple of the early tests:

50x50x50 (125k cubes, 1.5m tris)



60x60x60 (216k cubes, ~2.6m tris)


I couldn't push Rhino much further than that on 32bit Vista.

JD

[Polyxo]

2,6 millions only? Hmm - I rendered about that polycounts out of Rhino already without using blocks...

[JDHill]

The aim wasn't to test polycount, of which I've rendered 8 or 9 million from Rhino on a 32bit OS - I was basically testing the handling of high numbers of blocks/instances, and the material handling in that scenario. The cube material was by-parent, and the colored ones were selected/assigned using a crossing-window.

[polynurb]

Hello Guys,

seeing Holger's test I was wondering at which scenarios Instancing and SSS are troublesome, if used together...

The Rhino-Logo render looks fine to me, but reading other threads like this:

http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... +instances

it seems not to be officially supported.
Any rules or No-nos that might help here?

cheers,

:polynurb

[JDHill]

At the time it was compiled, I was not aware of any SSS-related limitation, so there will be no checks for that. It does check whether blocks use emitter materials, since this is not supported. I suppose the best thing is to just proceed as normal, but check the bug list if you run into anything which seems strange. To me, the SSS issue looks as if it's related to instances of objects which are rectangular, but that's just a guess.

[hyltom]

I had the same thinking than Polynurb when i read that Polyxo used SSS with instance. Here it seems to work pretty well. So if i understand everything well, on one side we have instance working with SSS but with the statement that it's buggy and on the other side, we have many problem with appearing black dots but without any confirmation that there is a problem somewhere.
What's going on?

EDIT: Jeremy, do you have any idea, thinking or solution about the black dots? Nobody related to NL Team have spoken about that issue. Have you ever face this problem?

[JDHill]

You're probably asking the wrong person - I would have no idea about that, since I just write plugins. I also have never seen it myself - most likely, they (NL) did not either; I don't recall ever seeing a report of it during testing.

[Polyxo]

Hmm...no problems here. This one is SSS only (from the presets list)

[valerio]

how do I assign different materials to every instance?

thanks

[JDHill]

1. make a cube
2. select the cube, go to Object Properties > Material
3. change 'Assign by' to 'By Parent'
4. make a block from the cube
5. copy it a few times
6. select one of the copies
7. select a Material
8. right-click > Assign to Selected
9. repeat with other copies/Materials

Regarding step 8, this is necessary because for some reason, drag-drop will not select block references in the viewport.

JD