Instancing in indigo

plot-paris · 17 Jun 2008, 08:43

I would love to see how far you can get indigo in concerns of instancing.
(I know kwistenbiebel and whaat did some quite impressive examples already ).

my first test with instancing and dummies within SketchUp:

one of these tripple helix shapes has a file size of 3.5 Mb.
I used 2500 instances in the render - the export took less than a minute!
and indigo used only 175 Mb ram (instead of 3.5 x 2500 = 8750 Mb)

what were your results with playing with instances / component dummies?

I am looking forward to see all your nice, impressive, stunning, funny images

Whaat · 17 Jun 2008, 17:34

Instancing tests are cool! I hope to see some more!

If you want to get really creative, use a combination of dummy instancing+SketchyPhysics...and make good use of Didier's wonderful component spray tool.

plot-paris · 18 Jun 2008, 12:04

thanks for the idea, Whaat. I messed arround with tree proxies and was soon at 10 000 instances. took an awfully long time to export

I pushed the use of proxies a bit further and wanted to find out, if nested proxies are possible (proxies within proxies)

well, obviously they are - what a wonderful tool! so you can create immensly detailed and complicated models and still be able to work fluently in SU? Great!

I then created some simple buildings (based on the same component), assembled these to building blocks and created a nice city area.
unfortunately my pc (Core2Duo @ 3.0 Ghz, 2 Gb Ram) can't cope with it anymore.

indigo, as well as the skindigo exporter seem to break down, if it gets too complicated (I wouldn't have expected differently).
now I would very much like to know, if the possible complexity depends on the power of the machine or on indigo itself.
I did a short test of a reduced city model (1/20 of it's original size). still took a long time to export...

it would be great if one of you guys with the incredibly powerful monster computers (like Coen) had a try. thus we knew, if it solely depends on the machine - and I have to save a lot of money to buy a new one

here is the file (the whole city with 1920 buildings is only 200 kb):
city.skp

thanks,

Jakob

remus · 18 Jun 2008, 12:27

Jakob, your exports are probably failing because they run out of RAM. If you got some spare cash waiting to be spent you could fork out for a couple more gigabytes, youd probably have enough to do a lot bigger scenes.

Gotta try out proxies again, your tests are pretty inspiring.

kwistenbiebel · 18 Jun 2008, 12:30

Very cool test.
Also very creative to make a proxy of a group of proxies. Why didn't I think about that before ? .

The city is great! Superb even when you look at the files size Only 192 Kb

plot-paris · 18 Jun 2008, 12:49

right you are, remus. I just tried again... indigo crashes after my use of ram rises beyond 2,5 Gb (and I have only 2Gb physical Ram).
I hoped to prevent this by enabling instances. but I am afraid my city has to wait until I got some money left

@remus said:

Gotta try out proxies again, your tests are pretty inspiring.

that was my intention!
kwistenbiebel, remus; I am looking forward to see what you come up with!

kwistenbiebel · 18 Jun 2008, 13:06

I did my share of experiments I believe .
Never had Indigo crashing, even when having millions of polygons.
I guess the 8Gb Ram I have installed comes to use in this case.

Stinkie · 18 Jun 2008, 15:18

8 Gb? Wuss!

remus · 18 Jun 2008, 15:53

your making me jealous

plot-paris · 20 Jun 2008, 10:49

I simplified the windows component a bit (reduced it from 16 to 5 faces) and tried a render again. now it worked perfectly fine with only 200 Mb Ram used by Indigo.

I even was able to place another building into the scene (which by itself is 20 times bigger in file size than the whole city).
granted, this twisted shape may look a bit alien in the otherwise orthogonal city. understand it as a symbol for SketchUp's unique and inovative workflow amidst loads of other applications with their narrow minded interfaces

(in the model are 1910 buildings plus the twisted one)

this city is very basic: 5 different building heights (all based on the same storey component), assembled in 10 different block types.
just imagine, what wonderful and huge cities you can render if you put in a bit more time and effort to create variations...

Kenny · 20 Jun 2008, 16:23

I tried the original model and it started loading but I got a run time error. I've got a pretty good spec too with 4GB Ram and a Core 2 duo E6850 processor.

Kenny

remus · 20 Jun 2008, 16:27

I think a run time error is when it runs out of memory, not sure what would cause it though, if jakob can render it on his machine

plot-paris · 23 Jun 2008, 14:08

dear Kenny, thanks for trying out my model. I would very much like to see, what you can get out of it (for your pc seems to be quite capable )

@remus said:

not sure what would cause it though, if jakob can render it on his machine

well, I was only able to render the whole model after simplifying the windows...

here is that version (without the twisted building though - that is more than 4 Mb filesize)
city_simplified.skp

plot-paris · 24 Jun 2008, 07:33

and here another very quick one - 13 680 golden eggs(even with a cube as proxy very slow in SketchUp). quite fast to export though...
(thanks to OnSurface, JPP, ComponentSpray tools - model was set up in a second )

I hope to find the time to do something more fancy soon...

plot-paris · 15 Jul 2008, 13:03

this image may not look very interesting. the only purpose was to test out polygon limits of indigo.

well, I am tempted to believe there are no limits

one of these forms has more than 55.000 polygons. in this scene I had almost 24.000 instances (low-res proxies in SketchUp, automatically replaced with the original by indigo).

that means, that indigo had to handle more than 1.3 Billion! polygons(1.300.000.000)

only 60 MB of ram were used by indigo for this very small image (exponentially more, when increasing the file size)...

chango70 · 15 Jul 2008, 13:08

Would this work with Vray?

ilay7k · 15 Jul 2008, 13:11

no...only plans

plot-paris · 15 Jul 2008, 13:52

as far as I know, v-ray doesn't support instancing at present.

the most amazing tool about indigo in this case is not only that it allowes instancing, but that you can use a low-poly component as proxy in SketchUp, that are replaced with a high polygon component, when exported to indigo. otherwise you would have no chance to handle such a huge scene in SU...

I am not aware of any other render-engine, that does that.

Frederik · 15 Jul 2008, 14:10

@plot-paris said:

as far as I know, v-ray doesn't support instancing at present.

Correct...

@plot-paris said:

I am not aware of any other render-engine, that does that.

This is not correct...
It's not that I want to hi-jack your thread, but I need to correct you since Kerkythea also supports instancing and you can use proxies in SU and replace these with instanced objects in KT...

Please check out this thread, which is a small step-by-step tutorial I've posted at the KT Forum...

Jon · 15 Jul 2008, 14:32

@frederik said:

Kerkythea also supports instancing and you can use proxies in SU and replace these with instanced objects in KT...

In fact, Alex once did a test in KT involving a few billion polygons more than that.
These are great tests, plot. Keep it up.
PS. I though Vue6 could export proxy objects
Does anyone know for sure?