What size populations do you typically use?

[jo]

Hi everyone,

Something I've wondered about for a while is what size populations you'd typically use, and what is the largest you've used. By "size" I mean the number of instances. I'd be very interested to hear what you use. It doesn't have to be accurate, I'd just like a rough idea. Even an idea of the area and spacing would be helpful, for example 10,000m by 10,000m with 10 m spacing.

Regards,

Jo

[Dune]

I seldom go over 100.000 instances per pop, and mostly restricted to about 6000x6000m. For far pops I have very low poly trees. The default spacing is pretty mean (average), as for grasses it's sometimes 0.1, and solitary oaks sometimes 25.

[Tangled-Universe]

This is pretty difficult to answer, because it's very dependant on what I'm looking for.
If I want much variation in trees/bushes then I use higher spacing values so that they mix more easily.
Do I want huge carpets of similar models then I just load 2 or 3 models max and use small spacing, quickly increasing instance numbers.
I don't think I'm very representative when it comes to these as I'm always trying to push the limits of the software and especially my machine.
I have 16GB of RAM so I like stuffing it with as many pops as possible up to the point I can just render it with the settings I have in mind.

Trees are usually in the 100s of thousands max, but only for large scale work.
Small scale stuff, which I do more often, has several 1000 trees.
Tree spacing is ~8 to 20 metres. Sparse trees around 40-50.
Bushes and the like scale accordingly, usually around ~5-10x more than trees.
Spacing of bushes is usually about half that of the trees, so 3-8 metres I remember to use the most.

With grasses I quickly have a couple of million of each grass species, usually I use 4-6 grass types.
On some occassions I use even bigger numbers, but I always try to avoid that because the populating process is still not multi-threaded
Spacing is typically around 0.05-0.25 (depends on model size).

My biggest population by area is ~25x25km with 8m spacing IIRC. How many instances are those, ~(25000/8)^2 = ~10M I think.
My biggest population by numbers I can't remember exactly right now.

[mhaze]

Pretty much the same as the others.  I used to have much larger pops but I've got cleverer at masking them!

[cyphyr]

The default is to have the object that your populating inside the Populator node. I prefer not to work that way. By having the object outside the populator node it can be easily re-used by several populations (not that it can't be accessed from populations internals, it's just easier to work with when it's on the top level with everything else). So when I have a scene, say a hilly one there is no point in populating stuff I can't see, for example stuff on the back of a hill. I find it better to have several populations using the same object placed so they are only populating the areas that the camera can see.  Saves on memory, saves on "populating" time and each population can be set to render at a different quality depending on distance. The actual number of objects in a population will vary a considerably  and is entirely dependant on need. For example a grass field close to the camera will be dense enough (probably using several populations of different models for variety), that the ground surface is almost completely obscured. The same grassy field further away will need a less dense population since the camera angle will be "flatter", looking more at the edge of the grasses rather than the top so seeing even less of the ground surface. You can use a distance shader to blend pretty seamlessly between these two kinds of population.

[FrankB]

Hi everyone,

Something I've wondered about for a while is what size populations you'd typically use, and what is the largest you've used. By "size" I mean the number of instances. I'd be very interested to hear what you use. It doesn't have to be accurate, I'd just like a rough idea. Even an idea of the area and spacing would be helpful, for example 10,000m by 10,000m with 10 m spacing.

Regards,

Jo

Hi Jo, I wonder why you ask? Any feature development on you mind? ;-)

cheers
Frank

[Tangled-Universe]

I didn't dare to ask, but wondered the same! 

[cyphyr]

And to answer your actual question, since I didn't read it properly first time.
Current project is using populations from 10m x10m with a density of 0.1 to 8000m x 4000 with a densities of 20 x 20 and 600 x 600 and everything in-between. 24 pops in total.
Not much help I guess

Hmmm intriguing

[Tangled-Universe]

Yes I forgot to add that to my intial post...I generally use roughly 10-25 populations too.
More than 25 is rare and rather an exception.

[RArcher]

My populations (except foreground) usually cover pretty large areas but the total number of instances is never all that high.  Depending on the type of tree or the look I want I generally keep the spacing at 0.5 x 0.5 or so and then blend this area by a powerfractal to get smaller clumped areas of densely packed trees or bushes with more realistic spacing.  A big issue with this approach is that it takes forever to calculate since the entire 10k x 10k area is sampled at 0.5 x 0.5 even though the amount of actual instances is low.

[otakar]

Difficult question. I have tried going over a million instances, but that is rare. Usually it's in the tens of thousands and below. Often times only a few (<20) instances, for tree or animal clusters for example. As I learned to use the tool better I was able to reduce instance counts via masking and built in population area modifiers.

[TheBadger]

With grass I have done something like .5-.005 x2 density, over anywhere from 15meters to 500+m, on each object variation.
I think I have had to go much larger than this too, in order to get total coverage in my target areas.

[jaf]

The last scene I worked on, originally intended for the NWDA contest but didn't finish in time because of my real job, had the following populations (taken from the tgdcli output):

     10,000  objects created by Populator "Pop wheat.tgo"
     28,561  objects created by Populator "Pop cornPlant.tgo_1"
          576  objects created by Populator "Pop ND01_Grass1_v6.tgo"
              9  objects created by Populator "Pop tundraheather-2.tgo"
1,401,856  objects created by Populator "Pop ND01_Grass3_v5.tgo"
            16  objects created by Populator "Pop Shrub02.tgo"
          576  objects created by Populator "Pop Dandelion_v3.tgo"
          625  objects created by Populator "Pop Weed1_v2.tgo"
     32,400  objects created by Populator "Pop cornPlant.tgo_1_1"
              9  objects created by Populator "Pop tundraheather-2.tgo_1"
   119,025  objects created by Populator "Pop wheat.tgo_1"
          256  objects created by Populator "Pop reed-4.tgo"
            32  objects created by Populator "Pop reed-2.tgo"
          256  objects created by Populator "Pop reed-3.tgo"
          625  objects created by Populator "Pop cattail-2.tgo"
          625  objects created by Populator "Pop cattail-1.tgo"
          100  objects created by Populator "Pop FL34_3_Amaryllis.tgo"
            36  objects created by Populator "Pop BS17a_Kanzan_Cherry.tgo"
          100  objects created by Populator "Pop FL34_2_Amaryllis.tgo"
=======
1,595,683

As you can see, I used a lot of my NWDA purchases plus some free Xfrog stuff (can't wait for NWDA to be back online!)

[Dune]

A big issue with this approach is that it takes forever to calculate since the entire 10k x 10k area is sampled at 0.5 x 0.5 even though the amount of actual instances is low.

Maybe it would be faster if we could directly influence the seed, i.e. use a PF as seed.

[FrankB]

....
As you can see, I used a lot of my NWDA purchases plus some free Xfrog stuff (can't wait for NWDA to be back online!)

That's so kind of you to say that! We're working on the comeback :-)


Frank