Saving calculated populations

[Henry Blewer]

I forgot to turn off Microsoft update. Last night I was rendering and the update rebooted the computer.

Could populations be saved in a future update? It would save a lot of time between work sessions. I have 7 populations so far in a project. The calculation for them is taking about 2 hours. (It will be shorter when I decide on a final POV.)

[Hetzen]

Caching populations would indeed be helpful, especially when you want to animate that scene.

[freelancah]

Yeah this would be a real time killer. Calculating populations can take a long time and this feature would be nice indeed!

[goldfarb]

I'm sure this has been requested a few times (I know I've done so )
additionally the ability to export the point cache would be good...because then you could mess with it in a external application

[Oshyan]

Yes, we're definitely aware of these kinds of requests. They're sensible steps for future improvement.

- Oshyan

[mhle]

From what I can tell, the population mechanism does not seem to be multithreaded, being able to use more than one core would speed things up.

[jo]

From what I can tell, the population mechanism does not seem to be multithreaded, being able to use more than one core would speed things up.

Yes, you're right. We do plan to multithread it and that should make a considerable difference. It's kind of a separate issue to being able to save populations, which wouldn't be a bad thing either.

Regards,

Jo

[FlynnAD]

Hi Planetside,

I'm wondering if there is any further development or news about the ability to save population caches. Since TG2 is developing more powerful animation capabilities, this would be one that would certainly help. Rendering on a multi-machine animation farm with a fixed, read-only population file would save each of those individual slave machines lots of time by not having to recalculate the population on each machine.

Obviously a saved population cache would not work with a population calculated & clipped by a moving camera, that's understood and not asked for.

Thanks,
-Matt

[PeanutMocha]

Obviously a saved population cache would not work with a population calculated & clipped by a moving camera, that's understood and not asked for.

As long as the overall population fits in RAM (leaving room for rendering itself), it seems clipping is not needed if the population is saved.

An advanced version to assist in a RAM constrained environment would be to run the camera animation virtually to calculate all points viewed by the camera, and then perform the population generation, clipping to the points just calculated.

[Oshyan]

We're considering population caching for a future version.

- Oshyan