harbour 1100 AD

Started by Dune, May 26, 2015, 10:55:27 AM

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Dune

Though it's extremely quiet at the forum, so not very tempting to post, I will still do so for the few who remain :P New museum wall, an extension of my previous 85m wall. This will be 18x4m (40,000x8000px render), first test of layout. Lots to decide still, and lots of buildings to make. River 135m wide, slightly hilly terrain, road/path coming towards the viewer. Pop of cards of 2m high for checking purpose. No holiday for me  :(

Hannes

The man who never sleeps... ;)
Looking forward to your progress.

archonforest

Quote from: Dune on May 26, 2015, 10:55:27 AM
This will be 18x4m (40,000x8000px render)
:o
will be a looooong render... ::)
Dell T5500 with Dual Hexa Xeon CPU 3Ghz, 32Gb ram, GTX 1080
Amiga 1200 8Mb ram, 8Gb ssd

otakar

Rest assured Ulco that I have been popping in almost every day and I always enjoy your posts. Now getting to actually render anything myself is quite another thing. And I suspect with school vacations starting activity here will slow down even more. I will be looking for some central European inspiration myself starting next week :)

This should be another major project. With that kind of size the required detail will be immense. No idea how you do it.

dorianvan

Is this just a piece or the whole view?
-Dorian

Dune

#5
I'll post for you guys, to keep up the spirit. Just heard that the client had another view in mind, from the water, but I don't think that's a good idea; no depth, and too narrow area of interest, a test is due. Btw. this is the whole area, Dorian. I'll try to get the horizon and angle so that I can divide this into 2 parts, 2 whole renders, with 45º (?) rotated view, so they'll fit px by px together. Easier to work in. Where the tree is there will be a door, so I shouldn't put anything interesting there. The closer I get to buildings and boats, the more detail they require, so I have to know placement and layout in advance.

EDIT: not going to divide in two; this works quite fine.

bobbystahr

Hand up...I'm here as well...class is convened...we watch and learn.
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

dorianvan

I like the upper image as a picture, but if their area of interest is over on the houses side, then that might not work. I'm curious, how deep is your river? The surrounding grading looks so flat, I'm not sure how you got water. Was it just a slight dip in the terrain for the water (no translucency)? I do like your water by the way, I think you are getting better and better at it. Let me know if you need help rendering strips.
-Dorian

mhaze

Fascinating to see your approach - looking forward to seeing more.

Dune

There's no water here, Dorian, it's just a quick image map to set out the layout. Quick pf over it for at least some variation, but all elements still have to be made; heights, water, textures, etc.

TheBadger

It has been eaten.

Dune

Next phase. This will be the view, and a first problem has arisen. The total render size will be 32400x7200px, which I hoped to do as one. Maybe by two large crops if necessary. But even a very small crop takes 15.8 gig of memory, and I only have 16Gb.
Without GISD that works okay, be it that detail and AA were low (0.4 and 4), hardly any objects yet, and no fancy stuff like soft reflection and soft shadows (that won't take more memory I guess, just takes longer). Higher detail and AA won't take more memory either I guess, just time.
But TG hangs if I use GISD, after having rendered the crop and whilst calculating GISD. Can't stop him either, nothing happens, not in a few hours. See screenshot.

So, is this memory related? Or size of the total render? Why is the memory use so high, what is being remembered, size?

Another option would be to divide the render size in two parts, but then it's hard (for me at least, last time Ben was my hero) to calculate the sizes, camera angles, and such. This view is looking down at 3.5º, so that makes it just a bit harder than a straight view.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

kaedorg

If I remember well a few big renders, crops used a near amount of memory of the complete view.
So let's imagine a 100000 x 100000 view. It would not be possible to render it by succesive crop renders unless having a ton of RAM.
I think Oshyan could give you the technical explanation.

David



Oshyan

Well, it's a bit strange it would be using that much memory already if the scene is not that complex. There are a few things to check. First off higher AA does absolutely increase memory use. Second, at that image resolution just the image alone is using about 1GB of memory, and that's without any additional render layers you might be calculating. If you *are* using any render layers/elements, make sure you absolutely need them as they'll increase memory use. Also use of DoF and GISD will both cause TG to generate additional buffers to apply those effects, which uses more memory.

You should certainly use default subdiv cache size, or even decrease it to save memory. If you've increased it, set to 100MB/thread. So your cache should be 800MB maximum, judging by your screenshot (which shows, I think, a 4 core/8 thread machine).

You can also save some memory by restarting TG before a render and not enabling any display of 3D objects.

Check the total size (on disk) of all your assets (textures, objects, etc.) and let us know what you have. If an image is a JPG, remember that even though it's compressed on disk, it still has to be uncompressed when loaded and used for rendering.

Crop renders will use a bit less memory for various reasons, but they still have to have the entire image area in memory, as well as all assets (objects, textures, etc.).

- Oshyan

Dune

Thanks Oshyan. One gig is more what I expected indeed. The assets are very scarce at this point, and will probably not take more than 1 gig either at the full setup (I will load textures separately and link from within if it's getting too much). DoF is not needed, but higher AA and detail is, probably I can do with 0.6 and 6. GISD is important. I don't use any layers at all.
The subdiv cache was at 1600, so I'll set that back (you're right, it's an i7 4 core, which by default sets it at 1200).
I've noticed before that restarting works smoother. I even have to restart some renders after fiddling with nodes and settings for a while, or it will crash. And for bigger renders I am used to pause without any fancy displays ánd turn off the preview.
I'll be experimenting no doubt. Also thinking about doubling my memory to 32 gig. Sets me back €240, so I'm still considering that. Or send it to PixelPlow.