Mantra crash rendering instances

[landscaper]

Hi,

I have a heighfield of 10912 x 10912 px with multiple heightfield nodes using a cop network texture. I try to instance 1,6 millions of trees with the heighfield_scatter node, which is no problem in the scene view, but with Mantra renderer. Mantra eats insanely much RAM, no matter I use full geometry or packed primitives of the trees. The tree loaded as full geometry has 26 MB and as packed primitive 14 KB. The render resolution is 6000 x 4000 px. The maximum number of trees, which I can render without chrashing Mantra is 800.000. I have also tried instancing through the instance node, which changes nothing. Do you have any ideas for another solution as upgrading to 256 GB RAM ?

Kind regards

System:

Core i7 7820X, 128 GB RAM, GTX 1080 graphics card

 

[sb526]

On 02/11/2020 at 3:56 PM, landscaper said:

Hi,

I have a heighfield of 10912 x 10912 px with multiple heightfield nodes using a cop network texture. I try to instance 1,6 millions of trees with the heighfield_scatter node, which is no problem in the scene view, but with Mantra renderer. Mantra eats insanely much RAM, no matter I use full geometry or packed primitives of the trees. The tree loaded as full geometry has 26 MB and as packed primitive 14 KB. The render resolution is 6000 x 4000 px. The maximum number of trees, which I can render without chrashing Mantra is 800.000. I have also tried instancing through the instance node, which changes nothing. Do you have any ideas for another solution as upgrading to 256 GB RAM ?

Kind regards

System:

Core i7 7820X, 128 GB RAM, GTX 1080 graphics card

 

Not a direct solution but have you considered combining Houdini forces with Unreal Engine 4?

https://forums.unrealengine.com/community/general-discussion/36657-1016064-trees

You can recreate Heightfields very easily and there are way more optimisation options for instancing including LODs so that you can render lower-res trees based on distance

Alternatively, you could build you custom LOD setup in Houdini where tree instances are replaced by lower resolution ones based on the distance from the camera or the camera view cone?

[nuki]

hey there! can you share an example file? how do you apply materials? if you are packing the objects before scattering, the amount of copies should have no impact on memory usage.

Edited November 26, 2020 by nuki