Jump to content

1 trillion particles?


TheUsualAlex

Recommended Posts

Just out of pure curiosity, has anyone here attempted to generate somewhere from 1 billion to 1 trillion particles for Mantra to render? I am so tempted to give this a try just for the heck of it. However, I think I'd need to figure out how to generate particles along a certain path in PERL, tho.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Actually outputing to Mantra might work...

But what situation would require trilions of particles? I could name a few ... but what I actually mean is: What requires that amount of particles that couldn't be done with less than that?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

at the moment i'm using 300,000 particles for a field of wheat the only problem is when you set mantra of to render it's hit or miss weather it accually renders the file. normally you get a .tif with an 'end of file error' 1 trllion would brake the whole thing unlease you had a IBM supercomputer will terrabytes of ram.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Actually, the idea came after I was seeign that sputter fish thinggy Final Render was rendering out like 58 million poly characters (or somethings?). So I was just wondering if it's possible to put Mantra into that kind of stress. And since SCAD has plenty of computer idleing at the beginning of the quarter and at night, I guess "why not". :D

BUt first, I need to populate those particles first.......

Need... mas.... mas particles....

Alex

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Why would someone want to render hundreds of millions, or billions of particles? Well, you couldn't make something like this if you sputtered out at a couple hundred thousand.

SPORE...it's Doc Bailey's particle system, seen in SOLARIS. Really pretty stuff. And, supposedly, these images took minutes on SGI hardware.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So why the heck would you want t..... nah, I'm just kidding Alex. :P I've rendered close to 2million particles with houdini, but it was really chugging along. From what I remember hearing is that there might be a bug with houdini when using 350k+ particles, that makes the memory go outta controll. Or something bad anyway.

But here's one for ya: How many layers will the compositor want you to render those 1 trillion particles in??? Did you ever think of that??? WELL??? DID YOU???

:lol:

Anyhoo, I look forward to finding out if you were able to do it.

Cheers!

Jens

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Haahaa.

Actually, after you mentioned that 2 million is already troublesome, I am now 99.999% sure I won't be able to do it. ANd 100% sure especially because the lab computer are Windooz.

But hey, it'd be fun still to see if I can choke the network for the sake of "don't let the computers go idle at night."

:lol:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Err.... we all love to blame M$, hell it's great. Because Windoze and all those other shitty M$ products suck so mighty bad.

But rendering a trilion particles? I think even CRAY's wouldn't be able to do that without "overcooking" <_<

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, we had a certain amount of success rendering half a million small metaballs - all in astoundingly good time too. About 12 mins a frame and in decent RAM usage. But at this stage you definately need a renderer built for particle rendering if you want to go much over 2mil particles. Mantra has huge power for traditional surface rendering and hasn't been optimized for particle rendering. However, that being said, mantra in Houdini 6 has support for someone to write in a procedural particle generation capability inside the renderer. This will make feeding particles into mantra easier.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Also, did you know that the IFD format you feed into mantra is actually a a command sctructure which is a subset of hscript itself. In other words there is nothing preventing you from writing for/next loops inside the IFD and letting mantra generate its own geometry. This is really really powerful if you're willing to experiment with it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Also, did you know that the IFD format you feed into mantra is actually a a command sctructure which is a subset of hscript itself. In other words there is nothing preventing you from writing for/next loops inside the IFD and letting mantra generate its own geometry. This is really really powerful if you're willing to experiment with it.

Wow! Rock on, Jason! :D I never knew that you can run a loop inside ifd file. I was looking at it more like a scene description rather than command. :)

Awesome!

EDIT: uuhhh.... what am I saying... scene description is command...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 years later...
Wow! Rock on, Jason! :D I never knew that you can run a loop inside ifd file. I was looking at it more like a scene description rather than command. :)

Awesome!

EDIT: uuhhh.... what am I saying... scene description is command...

Hi there,

Sorry for reanimating this old thread. I just mentioned this application in a talk with some of my colleagues and tried to re investigate it a bit. I know that it's been some time since Dr.Baily has passed, truly sorry for that...

nevertheless - I've got acros this small app. - Flame Fractals

and thought about - maybe somebody knows whether SPORE is downloadable, or is it an in-house tool these days, or maybe just forsaken?

rrr

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If I am not mistaken:

SPORE is now KRAKATOA an inhouse point renderer of frantic films.

It is currently in a beta test to be released to public.

A friend of mine is beta tester I will have to ask him whats going on with this tool

Some information can be found at cgtalk:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php...age=1&pp=15

Georg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Err.... we all love to blame M$, hell it's great. Because Windoze and all those other shitty M$ products suck so mighty bad.

I have tried 5 mio particles on my quad Xenon 3,2 Ghz ...

the particles used 1,4 Ghz of memory and it took about 1 min per frame to cook the simulation.

I think this is not so bad ;)

post-77-1174978036_thumb.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The problem lies in when you add a few attributes to the mix.... kablam! No more houdini.

In the sims we're doing right now, we can max out at around 1.5m particles with all the necessary attributes or else we run out of RAM.

We can render a ton more, but generating them is another issue altogether :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...