TheUsualAlex Posted February 27, 2003 Share Posted February 27, 2003 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
plan9 Posted February 27, 2003 Share Posted February 27, 2003 heh, twisted... my machine was chugging on 10k particles, 1 billion would probably put the piece of crap to rest for good.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MG Posted February 28, 2003 Share Posted February 28, 2003 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheUsualAlex Posted February 28, 2003 Author Share Posted February 28, 2003 Umm... I am talking about "just for the heck of it" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cs00bren Posted March 3, 2003 Share Posted March 3, 2003 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
plan9 Posted March 3, 2003 Share Posted March 3, 2003 a field of 300k particles is quite excessive, have you looked into the cade grass tutorial? http://cade.scope.edu/courseware/notes/hou...dini/index.html ultimately, the effect is done in post...but youll be able to render at least!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheUsualAlex Posted March 4, 2003 Author Share Posted March 4, 2003 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". BUt first, I need to populate those particles first....... Need... mas.... mas particles.... Alex Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pockets Posted March 4, 2003 Share Posted March 4, 2003 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheUsualAlex Posted March 4, 2003 Author Share Posted March 4, 2003 It was just for the heck of it. There is absolutely no reason to do so whatsoever. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anakin78z Posted March 4, 2003 Share Posted March 4, 2003 So why the heck would you want t..... nah, I'm just kidding Alex. 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??? Anyhoo, I look forward to finding out if you were able to do it. Cheers! Jens Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheUsualAlex Posted March 4, 2003 Author Share Posted March 4, 2003 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." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MG Posted March 4, 2003 Share Posted March 4, 2003 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" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Posted March 7, 2003 Share Posted March 7, 2003 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Posted March 7, 2003 Share Posted March 7, 2003 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheUsualAlex Posted March 7, 2003 Author Share Posted March 7, 2003 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! 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... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MADjestic Posted March 23, 2007 Share Posted March 23, 2007 Wow! Rock on, Jason! 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rdg Posted March 23, 2007 Share Posted March 23, 2007 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andz Posted March 25, 2007 Share Posted March 25, 2007 Cool, so looks like my theory here wasn't really crazy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mike Posted March 27, 2007 Share Posted March 27, 2007 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marc Posted March 28, 2007 Share Posted March 28, 2007 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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