rendering ultra high poly assets

ArtsyFartsy

I'm trying to figure out how to render the high poly versions of my assets. By render, i just mean taking a screenshot, no fancy lighting.

I usually work on stuff piece by piece, and by the time all the sculpting is done the individual components are so high poly, and so numerous, that i can not combine them into 3d max, or mudbox, or zbrush and get a render of the entire high poly, because the software crashes.

Like this guy for example
http://www.3pointstudios.com/portfolio_vehicles.html

How do you guys do it? Is there like a batch renderer that i can use, or should I just learn to make more efficient models? I have access to 3ds max, mudbox 2009, zbrush, and xnormal, but i'm interested in any other software that deal with this.

Thanks

P.S.
Also, I'm running Windows XP, I have 2GB RAM, and a GeForce GTX 260

EDIT: fixed the hyperlink

Mark Dygert

The link, links to making a new thread...

Thought about rendering them as pieces and composting them?

What about importing each piece one at a time to its own layer and before importing another piece, create a new layer and hide the previous one?

If you can't get them all into the same file, make a camera and merge just it into each file, that should make composting easier.

EarthQuake

Simple answer would be to make more efficient meshes.

It might be a case of just keeping around your cage meshes, and not converting them to polys. Or not taking every little thing into mudbox and sub-dividing it into 10m polys just because you can.

ArtsyFartsy

thanks for the replies guys. You're all right, especially the part about making more efficient models, but even then, I know I wouldn't be able to render a complex model like this one from strangefate for example:



Yep. there's no way.

Compositing stuff is not such a bad idea, but I think it might be more headaches than it's worth. I'll give it a try though.

My 3ds max crashes out of memory somewhere around 1.5-2 million polys. The new mudbox doesn't always crash but it gets painfully slow.

I guess it's time to get out of the kiddie pool and swim into the open ocean of 64 bits.

seforin

why not build in chunks and render those chunks individual , for example if your having alot of floaters that are sub divided you can break those apart, and take big chunks that have micro details and bake those off as indivdual pieces.

the idea is when building high poly is to think while building it how you can break it apart for low poly. (unless if I myself am doing this method incorrect someone correct me)


and just to touch up on what eartquake is saying.

some pieces (like hard surface wise) dont need really to be subdivded in z-brush / mudbox to do micro details since theres plent of ways to achieve those effects with filters/ plugins and 3rd party programs, now on the other hand big blast marks (such as concrete being broken and rubble and such) you might want to spend the time to sculpt that, but for metals and hard surfaces only big focal points / parts you should think of brining into z-brush.


Another good practice is to build everything high but before exporting to do your sculpting or whatever, spend time to break/ attach your mesh in the chunks you invision you will break it that way when you export lets say robot head or whatever, you have all the floating geo etc that you have for the head area already labeled and you can take those into a program like xnormal and bake out your normal maps easily.


(again my experience with high poly work is from what I learned on my own if im doing this backwards and im corrected by all means please tell me!)

MoP

Set your viewport display to Bounding Box, and do very small test renders to make sure stuff is facing the right way. That way the polygon count in the viewport has no effect - you can just set the rendering environment to the same background colour as the viewport, set the resolution you want and render.

If your computer keeps crashing when trying to display huge polygon counts in the viewport because you want to viewport screengrab instead of render, then the solution is simple - don't viewport screengrab.

pior

Also as Seforin said - not every highpoly model is 'subdivided highpoly'. I actually think than the one spaceship by Strangefate posted above is all 'raw' polygon data - hence the very sharp quality of it.

JohnnyRaptor

with zbrush3 each subtool can have as much polys as your machine can handle, so you can have for example 10x 2mil poly subtools on screen. if you import your meshes as subtools in to zbrush, and with subtool master you can make em all one color and so on, u can get some decent screenshots that way!

oh and id definitely recommend more memory and 64bit. your current setup isnt ment for high high poly work :P get atleast 4gig and 64bit os. id say go to 8gig to be safe!