Various MEM MANAGEMENT and PROJ organization Qs

[5DNick]

Dear Forumers,

I am planning and continuing to construct my own pet project short film.

The vast majority of the 5 or 10 minutes it will fill is CG, for various obvious mainly ZERO budget considerations (i am a believer in as much practical as possible but you need to have budget obvs). The plan is I am going to do practically everything and it's a TALL order but one I hope to achieve within maybe 5 years of spare-time.

Anyway I'm not going to explain the idea here, but one major set and it's construction has been bugging me, mainly because of the title of this post. I intend to use Houdini and Redshift, for the 3d.

I currently have a very good home PC (18 Xeons, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090, possible need more SSDs though).

Anyway the set is in creation atm (an "underground science lab" that will contain 2 scientists that are not CG and only them). There is a central core with loads of stuff coming out of it (think AKIRA cold storage, ref attached) and inside loads more equipment. I have no idea what the polycount will be, but it's gunna be HUGE.

I think the problem is that most of the runtime is taken up by one single long take shot covering all different details in the lab and transiting outside eventually (I do plan hidden cuts but not sure many or maybe any poss inside lab).

So I am not a 3D expert, but not a noob either. So to actual questions:

1. How does one approach planning levels of detail and specific geo poly counts for shots and projects?

2. Displacement maps are obviously essential but how far can you go with them. Does using more displacement maps and less polys help the memory situation vastly?

3. What is normal memory used for if the GPU is holding the scene in it's memory?

4. I'm going to use SUBSTANCE PAINTER for textures. How important is the resolutions of these textures towards memory usage?

5. Any other general advice? (NB: going to do previz so I can see how much lack of detail I can get away with)

PS: Set is going be quite dimly lit (Obvs normal labs are bright and whitish but not going for this for artistic reasons), this should help hide some details missing???

Thanks for any advice,

5D