Problems Rendering High Poly Counts? Pipeline?

[popflier]

I have a scene that has over a million polys in it. It's just got a ton of items in a very small space. Maya/mental ray/renderman won't render a still frame of it. NONE of it is even textured or lit yet. Can someone give me some advice on how they would go about rendering this?

Right now I have all of the items referenced in. I am still setting up camera shots so I know once I get the cameras in order it will decrease the poly count. What about using LOD? Is it worth it to model out lower poly versions? Or should I use the surface sampler to create normal maps? I've not tried this before, but would it help my render times? I assume yes, but I'd just like to get an idea of what others would do in my situation.

thanks for any input

[joojaa]

Well the curious thing is that you never need million poly models. What you do is make a displacement map and you can pump way beyond in quality and get MUCH faster render speeds (especially with prman, becasue it does not amke extra polygons whan not needed, istant lod).

Theres no trick in dropping the infinity on your computer even a kindergarten child can do that.

In fact trick to rendering a gzillion poly scene, is not to use a single polygon. Its the same kind of thing as using too big texture maps. their only function i to make the render tmes higher and the filtering worse.

[popflier]

I do have some displacements on certain models. I used those where I could, but most of the items cannot solely be displaced as there are dynamics affecting most surfaces. So I could either use the more minimal surface I have created or I could export the same poly count level as an obj out of Mudbox. Either way it leaves me in the same situation.

[joojaa]

nothing says a displacement cant be dynamic, or part of a dynamic simulation! In fact most displacements ive used lately are.

(like nothing says a displacement has to move in the direction of the normal, thats not true either)

Making a lod in these circumstances isnt easier either. Offcours eit makes sense, since do you really need all the details, and can you use parametric surfaces isntead of polys, as especially prman renders them faster and more accyrately shaped with more details using displacement that a doubly dense poly.

PS. are you using a 64 bit system, if you are you could use prman porserver thatway your memory woulnt be a issue.

[popflier]

My only experience running displacements with dynamics was using Realflow and I couldn't get them to work together. The only solution I could find was to export an incredibly high res mesh in order to calculate the flow so that when I put the displacement on it would look as if it were on the surface. How can you make a displacement dynamic?

I actually would prefer to use parametric surfaces. However, there are several of us working on this and very few of us are proficient in parametric modeling. Because of this we are using polys and the approximation editor for subdivisions. The items in the scene are not really detailed. It is just that there are so many objects in such a small space. Because of that our poly count is at 1 million.

UPDATE we were able to clean up the scene quite a bit and can get a decent render time. However, I'd still be interested to learn how to run dynamics off displacements. If you could post more information on that it would be great. I realize that you can convert displacements to geometry and run dynamics that way, but if you can run dynamics off displacements without converting to geometry I'd be interested in hearing your solution.

thanks for the help!