Comments for Faster foliage renders at http://www.mrmaterials.com , comment 1 to 19 out of 19 comments http://www.mrmaterials.com Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:06:04 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-1294 Ut Ohhhh! You got him to thinking! ;) - Russell L Thomas Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:30:20 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-1293 Good tip on using photons to speed up the foliage renders too. The slow down does seem isolated to how FG traces rays from objects, through the cutout maps, back to the camera. I imagine that GI/photons would indeed provide a quicker render through cutout maps than FG alone. Thinking along those lines I wonder if Importons/IP may also be quicker with cutout/opacity maps than FG... - Jeff Patton Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:18:38 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-1291 Thanks for sharing your experience. - Russell L Thomas Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:30:52 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-1290 I ran into very long rendertimes too with FG, when using cutout maps for foliage. Then I enabled GI and my rendertimes went down dramatically. From several hours to 15 minutes for a medium-res render of a forest. It seems FG on its own has serious trouble with cutout maps, with together with GI it was no problem at all. Might be an alternative solution? - Ronnie Olsthoorn Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:46:14 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-1272 As long as I am a newbie, I tried with no success to copy the parameters, would it be possible to post the example file so i can compare?. how can I translate the standard material to A&D?..is there an example in this blog? thanks rodrigo - Rodrigo Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:03:35 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-943 Thanks for sharing your findings and technique. - Russell L Thomas Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:25:58 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-941 I've comped a quick screengrab together to show that there is another way of speeding up the process, without having to do special setups or changing materials. I must admit its not as big of a speed increase, but its something. Here is the screengrab: http://www.3idee.nl/sf/trees_faster.jpg - Michiel Quist Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:29:58 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-882 Great Jeff.. I love you Man.... you are my master - Hildevar Martins Sun, 18 Oct 2009 06:50:25 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-874 great tips thanks. Bt if i use for foliage some traslucency value?? and maybe some map? It can work anyway? thanks a lot - alan Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:53:18 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-831 Great tip! It will be pretty useful for animations. I usually calculate the FG map for the whole animation, then render. So, I guess a good workflow would be, at the final rendering stage, to duplicate the scene and modify the shaders of all the leaves and calculate the .fgm from this scene. And render from the original one, linking to the pre-calculated FG map... Your boss will be pretty happy with the speed gain! :-) - Alexandre Tessier Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:35:49 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-773 great tip mate.....saving me a bunch of time of fg calcs. - patrick anderson Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:00:52 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-735 Cool tip! I found it really useful also when using displacement maps. Thank you! - Hamilton Junior Sat, 01 Aug 2009 11:15:52 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-714 Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Indeed this method may not be optimal for all scenarios or people. That being said I don't agree that there's additional setup time with what I've described here. I've basically unchecked two boxes & assigned a color. That should only take someone a few seconds to do. However, if someone doesn't normally compute & save their .fgm file prior to rendering the final image...then yes, that will add some extra time to their process that they aren't normally accustomed to. Also FWIW, you shouldn't combine the 1:38 + 1:52 render times. A person would calculate (no render) & save their .FGM [i]then[/i] render. The 1:38 time I posted here includes a render + calculation time just so I could have an image here in my blog to assist in explaining the process. The actual time would be the .FGM calculation time + final render time which would be 48 seconds plus the 1:52 final render for a total of 2:40 which is much better than the original 4:16. Bottom line, this tip I've shared here is merely one method in a sea of possible methods. I posted it so people could explore this method and see if it helps save them some render time. This as with all the tips I've shared here won't be the perfect solution for all people or scenes. Perhaps I need to start adding this info as a disclaimer to all my posts. - Jeff Patton Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:13:49 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-712 Work flow wise, I think comparing the time savings for one tree to straight rendering and saying you only save a minute may not reflect real world applications where you may have a lot of trees in the scene where tweaking one material and saving the FG could save a lot of time. Thanks Jeff, I actually use the xFrog trees a lot in multiple render engines. - Russell L Thomas Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:01:45 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-711 I'm not sure this is really a better technique in terms of work flow. The first method took 4:16 in one step. The second method took 1:38 + setup + second render of 1:52 for a total of 3:30 with setup time in between. The other negative I can see in the second method is that if there are objects behind the tree that are visible in a render with cutout enabled will not receive proper FG during the second render with the FG map that was frozen when cutout was not enabled. From a production standpoint, the slight increase in total render time is not worth the sacrifice to work flow ease or image quality resulting from an incomplete FG solution. I work with XFROG in Mental Ray from time to time and find the following method does essentially the same as yours, Jeff, but has a lighter work flow implementation: http://www.vizdepot.com/forums/showthread.php?p=74726#post74726 - AdamS Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:06:38 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-709 I haven't personally tried it with any MetaSL materials, but I would [i]think[/i] you'd see a similar speed increase since it's more so a tweak for final gather than material related. Again though, I haven't personally tested this with any MetaSL materials so I can't give a definitive yes/no answer. - Jeff Patton Sun, 12 Jul 2009 08:57:39 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-707 its a good idea..would it help where i had thousands of planes with the MetaSl grass material??.. - Gurmukh Panesar Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:35:48 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-706 It makes sense! Really good tip Jeff! Thanks - Paulo Barrelas Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:53:11 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/103-faster-foliage-renders.html#comment-705 Great tip Jeff , thanks - Mariano Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:57:03 +0100