C4D for render large scenes

[imashination]

Originally posted by juanjgon
Hello to everybody ...

I am a LW user considering a second package to support render complex scenes and gloabal illuminated images. I have some basic questions about this issue ...

How well is C4D rendering large scenes with millions of polys?
Has C4D support for real instances? (example: render 2.000 instances of tree who has 30.000 polys)
How about global ilumination in complex scenes ... is it usable or is too slow?
Is globall ilumination solution stable in animatios or fliker?

Any comments abou this issues are wellcome :)
Thank you and regards,

1) Large scenes are fine. The largest I have had to deal with myself was 13 million, which was an imported CAD model of a truck chassis.

2) There are instances which make updating the files easy and reduce disk usage, however not in the way which something like EI does. To the best of my knowledge, EI is the only app which deals with instances this efficiently, however that would of course mean you have to use EI.

3) It is usable, but GI rendering isn't going to be the most fun thing in any package. R8 would be my first choice if I had to though. You can remove all flickering from GI by using several methods, such as the special animation GI options.

[JamesMK]

This was an interesting question, so I made some experiments...

Important notice:: I tried this on my extremely sub-par PC sporting a 466 MHz Celeron and 256 MB of memory running Win2K

- Added a standard capsule primitive, converted to editable mesh with 864 polygons.
- Made a group of 400 instances of that mesh
- Made another 4 groups of the above, thus making an additional 1600 instances - a total of 2 000 objects and 1 728 000 polygons.

The last thing was to add a skysphere and make a stochastic radiosity render at 320x240 pixels. Rendertime was just above 5 minutes (not including the excessive swap activity) with a very low setting for GI-accuracy (30%).

While rendering, memory usage peaked at around 1.3 GB.

The fact that Cinema survived this on such a lousy system as mine might perhaps prove something. I hope this can be useful information for you.

[ThirdEye]

Maybe this is a bit OT but i've never seen any other app opening a huge file in the same small amount of time that C4D spends. Try loading a huge scene in Maya and compare the time it spends to open it with C4D, you'll be amazed, it just imports a ton of polys in a blink of an eye.

[marcopio]

I am interested in getting the flickering out of my animation.
You mentioned that you can set a GI Setting, where do you do this. I have Cinema 4D 8.1

Thanks

[Ikari]

i would go that far to say c4d has (one of the) fastest rendering engines I#ve ever seen, none could compare it, and the GI speed (however iit's still long time) is very high. my biggest scene ever made in c4d was a very high-poly character in a high-poly xfrog-made forest, all together the polycount was about 8 million. with a low GI-setting (accuracy about 30 - 40%
and maximum resolution of 40) c4d rendered this scene in about 9 hours
on a high-end dual-cpu machine and an older duron machine (netrendering).
i ecessively used hyperNURBS, loftNURBS and phongtags (they smooth the mesh), and i used caustics to (cause there was a glas sphere in the scene).

i can recommend the c4d-renderer to anyone, cause of high quality at high speed-renbdering.

@marcopio: you have to install the module "advanced renderer" from the second disc of your package. then you can set caustics and radiosity (GI) settings.

[ThirdEye]

Consider that C4D is 90-95% OS independent so you'll never experience a crash (i had maybe 6 or 7 in 3 years and they were mostly due to user errors)

[marcopio]

Thanks Ikari, I have the Advanced Render installed. Now I know what GI settings mean....

[Ikari]

Originally posted by ThirdEye_01
Consider that C4D is 90-95% OS independent so you'll never experience a crash (i had maybe 6 or 7 in 3 years and they were mostly due to user errors)

hmm..this too.

i use 2k (cause of i'm using c4d just for 2 1/2 months now hehe) i had exactly 3 crashes. first was cause i used hairdepartment on a big area of fine poly's resultig in unbelievible high poly-counts (maybe 50 millions? dunno, cause my 2 gig RAM/ dual 2,4 ghz crashed instantly after trying to show me the hair about 4 minutes *hrhr*)
the other time i tried to use the c4d.exe in the realtime mode to improve the render-time (yeah it got fast for about 30 seconds, then crashed) and the third time was something similar to this above but dunno anymore what it was exactly

[danb]

man the more i use c4d the more i like it. and everyone seems to have the same opinions that i have of different aspects. the whole program, you know including render, animation, modeling, etc is rock solid. i have used cinema of and on for a while know and the only crashes i have had is when i used a third party plugin. i can totally recomend getting c4d if not only for the renderer. for example brazil r/s for 3dmax is its competitor. and while it is in many opinions better than the c4d renderer you are going to have to shell out 1200 just to buy it and then another 3500 to get it to work with 3dstucio max, which crashes all the time. final render, c4d's core renderer, and brazil are the fastest gi renderers out there. if you get c4d you are not only getting one of the best gi renderers, but you also get great modelling tools and for little money you can add on the best 3d painter, body paint. the best particle system, thinking particles. etc...etc..

you get the point.

but be careful, becuase if you start to use cinema 4d8 you might not want to use lightwave or anything else ever again. :thumbsup:

[Ikari]

but be careful, becuase if you start to use cinema 4d8 you might not want to use lightwave or anything else ever again. :thumbsup:


hehe you got it. c4d is so easy to use, especially if you compete it with maya or the horrible 3dmax interface.
and if you look on the improvements from release 7 to rl 8..man i cant wait to pre-order the rl. 9 update :applause:
after the renderer got from rl 6 to rl 8 almost 10 times faster with better results and they improved it again in 8.1..dunno how they do it, but if maxon improves the animation tools (here is maya still unreachable, i think) then (i hope so!) maybe c4d will become more respected and used (the gladiator pre-scenes were made with c4d i think) by both users and industriy

you try c4d, you see the interface, you see the easy but still complex and high-qualitiy modeller and the extremely good renderer - you forget all the other :buttrock: and the cinema 4d GO version together with 3 nessesary modules (adv. renderer, bodypaint, mocca) is only about 1300 €/$, here where i live for students only about 600$ (sponsored *gg*), so its low-cost and high-qualitiy

i used lightwave and i loved it, but c4d is faster, easier and the interface is much better. i used 3dmax and i still hate it. i used maya and love it still, but its so expensive (about 8000$ for the unlimited) so i just use it sometimes at a friend's graphic studio.

[Shademaster]

I work on a collaborative project with some people who use Lightwave too. Don't get me wrong, I really love the c4d radiosity engine and the raytrace engine even more - but I tried a Global Illumination render of a starship and got good result (some minor artifacts) with it. The ship looked fine and rendertime was 30 mins on 1024x768. My college with almost the same pc only on Lightwave, tried some GI renders too and cranked up artifact free, superhorny, hi-res renders of the same ship under 10 minutes! I fiddled with the radiosity settings and when I had a 10 minute render of the ship it looked very bad.

It could be my fault that I did something horribly wrong with the radiosity settings, but I was quite jealous at him for getting such quick results that where animation compatible because they where artifact free!

He said he used montecarlo radiosity with some sort of anti-noise filter :shrug: , I have no idea how he got it that fast, but on sheer GI rendering he beat me to it.

If anyone is interested I can post the 2 renders I spoke about.

Strange indeed.... Nevertheless, I still LOVE Cinema! It has everything you ever wanted + some extra. It's super stable and very easy and fun to learn (not something one can say about every app :hmm: ). Cinema is definatly something worth for your money! Wah! I luv it!

@Ikari, what is realtime mode?? Is it in something that Cinema uses?

:)

[danb]

i'm interested in the renders you are toalking about. i don't know but i thought lightwave gi tools were very slow. i tried the example files in lw7 and a simple scene took about 3 minutes to render. who knows though i do get confused with all the different renderers out there. through my experience though the c4d is fast and solid.

is there any upgrades planned for cinema? i hope they make the renderer distributed capable. and make some better character animation tools.

[Ikari]

Originally posted by Shademaster
He said he used montecarlo radiosity with some sort of anti-noise filter :shrug: , I have no idea how he got it that fast, but on sheer GI rendering he beat me to it.
......
@Ikari, what is realtime mode?? Is it in something that Cinema uses?

:)


the montecarlo renderer is similar to the arnold variation that c4d uses if you check the box "stochastic" in the radiosity settings. this mode doesnt use a prepass and makes kinda noisy picture, so thats why he used an anti-noise filter.

the realtime mode is the mode you can set to any process in the taskmanager if you right-click on the process and choose "process priority ---> real time"
ususally i use "high", cause its stable and improves the rendertime - but be warned - dont do anything during the high-priority rendering. your pc will lag extremely.

so, i recommend to try out the stochastic mode (in the radiosity settings). this is the montecarlo-mode of the arnold-renderer - should be faster if you set the "stochastic dunno-the english-name" from the default "300" doen to maybe "160" or so. please tell me if it worked out for you

[kevin3d]

Originally posted by juanjgon
Hello to everybody ...

I am a LW user considering a second package to support render complex scenes and gloabal illuminated images. I have some basic questions about this issue ...

BTW, This guys work is awesome!! Check out:

http://www.newtek-europe.com/uk/community/lightwave/gonzalez/1.html

[Shademaster]

I just did a stochastic render test and was very pleased with what I saw:
http://www.3dtv.nl/pix_members/comparison.jpg
The standard radiorender took 4 times longer and looked significantly more crap.

With some tweaks to the GI, mats and radiosettings something like the montecarlo render would be possible. If only stochastic mode had that filtering LW has....that would be awesome!!

Models are not 100% identical.

:)

[Per-Anders]

post the model/scene, lets see if we can't get that rendertime down some with still decent results :)

[Shademaster]

Ack, I am really sorry guys, but the Director would kill me if I did, really sorry...:blush: But you do post a nice topic here mdme_sadie! "How to get the cleanest stochastic render" would be a nice one. I read a lot about the normal radiosity render here but almost never about stochastic rendering. Maybe that would be interesting to study :lightbulb ,
It's funny thouh that the ground shadow in the c4d render for instance is nearly identical to the Lw one.

I'll get back to this tomorrow.
:)

[Per-Anders]

well what you could try is simply lwoering the quality, dropping the bounces (do you need two?) and upping the samples (that will help to get things smoother). also use a white skydome rather than grey.

i'm sure that we could get things down a bit lower with a bit of playing :)

[Byla]

Just one thing... Cinema is the most stable application I have ever seen. Specialy compared to Maya, Lighwave... And render engine is extremly fast and very very good.

[jeb]

Is it me or the ship you rendered in c4d has higher poly count?

Because from were im standing i see more details in it. maybe thats why it took longer.

[danb]

jeb, excellent point. the model looks much more detailed. not to mention there is a character in the cockpit. maybe adding to all the details and polygons.

[juanjgon]

Hey :beer: thank you for all your comments. I could say that LW in general and specially render engine provide very good results, and i have no problem working with it ... but i am always learning new tools and compare it ... usually images of my work tooks about 24 hours to render at print resolution, or 30 minutes to video ... i have no idea if it is slow ... but i want to compare.

LW has also an incredible plugin "HD Instance" who is a volumetric instance render ... you have no limits to render any kind of complex scenes ... i have render scenes with about 250 MPolygons without problems ... but it is some slow too ...

I always see to C4D from Amiga times ... perhaps is time to try it ... but i need true instance renderer .... perhaps next revision of C4D has it :rolleyes:

Thank you for your support ...
Regards,

[Shademaster]

No problem Juanjgon.
I know that cinema 4d has instances too, I don't know if they are anything like LW's but you might give them a try. I got some pretty complex, smooth running scenes with them.

I used mdme_sadie's settings for this one:

http://www.3dtv.nl/pix_members/stochmodenew.jpg

When I lower the diffuse depth to 1 the model doesn't look so washed out anymore. It basicly is the same as the Montecarlo render right now only difference is the filtering.

The lw version is remodelled by someone else and has something like 37.000 poly's while this one has 181.000 :eek: And it renders almost at the same speed! :buttrock: Cinema rocks!

[kromekat]

bookmarked

[Shademaster]

I get almost the same results if I lower the stoch samples by half, renders in 8 minutes then. It also looks like accuracy isn't taken into account! No difference in rendertime or quality between 10% or 90%.
:)

[Ikari]

Originally posted by Shademaster
I get almost the same results if I lower the stoch samples by half, renders in 8 minutes then. It also looks like accuracy isn't taken into account! No difference in rendertime or quality between 10% or 90%.
:)

maxon itself says their cinema 4d has got the fastest render-engine on the cg-market :)

i think if the scene would have more objects with complex surfaces (three or four ships) than you would see the difference between low and high stochastic samples.

but thx to you, i didnt ever try to lower

it by 90% and decrease my rendertimes extremely :D i tried it to, and man i'm satisfied.


but accuracy isnt taken to, maybe you've seen that if you check the stochastic box, some of the options of radiosity arent avaible anymore. only the one still avaible to set have an influence to the render-quality

[Shademaster]

here is a 10 minute render with optimized geometry (deleted everyting you don't see) and with some higher stochastic samples. Takes 10 minutes on a P4 3 gig. Other renders where on 2 gig AMD

http://www.3dtv.nl/pix_members/10-min-c4d-180kpoly.jpg

You can say the quality of the lw render is reached at higher poly counts and same rendertimes.

Weird they let you alter the accuracy if it doesn't have any noticable effect.
:)

[juanjgon]

I think that images posted here rendered with C4D has identical aparence of LW radiosity rendered images, perhaps both programs use equal method to compute radiosity solution ... but LW has a special filter to reduce noise in radiosity / area lights algorithms that solve part of noise problem ... i think that if C4D has faster ray tracing core than LW probably has faster GI too.

Regards,

[ThirdEye]

Originally posted by juanjgon
I think that images posted here rendered with C4D has identical aparence of LW radiosity rendered images, perhaps both programs use equal method to compute radiosity solution ... but LW has a special filter to reduce noise in radiosity / area lights algorithms that solve part of noise problem ... i think that if C4D has faster ray tracing core than LW probably has faster GI too.

Regards,


C4D and Lightwave don't share the same GI method unless you use Montecarlo in Lw and Stochastic mode in C4D which are basically something really similar. AFAIK Lightwave normally uses radiosity to compute the solution, C4D uses photon mapping exploiting the Cebas finalRender GI code, which is a more advanced method. The special filter of Lw is called "identical noise distribution" in C4D, and it assures you less noisy results and non flickering animations. About speed... i remember reading an article on a 3D magazine which compared C4D and Lw GI in an interior scene. If you used a small number of light bounces the Lw results were almost as fast as C4D (but a bit more noisy), if you increased the bounces number then C4D was 5 or 6 times faster than Lw itself, sometimes even 10. The raytracers can't be really compared, the rendertimes gap is really high.

[juanjgon]

Then of corse that C4D has more advanced GI solution ... photon mapping is more powerfull algorithm that montecarlo sampling ... i am not sure what method use LW when render GI in interpolated mode ... but is not as powerfull as photon mapping. LW cant save radiosity solution ... can C4D?

Next month ... if i have time :rolleyes: ... i am going to download demo version of C4D to compare results ... if it is posible in demo mode ... and post results ...

Best method to compare ray tracing and GI speeds is have a complex object cloned many times ... iluminate with a single light similar in both packages, and disable all antialiasing parameters to compute sure only one sample per pixel and no include antialiasing algorithms in final time.

Other question ... has C4D in his SDK any kind of volumetric archiecture in render engine ... something similar to volumetric plugins in LW who render things like Hipervoxels?. It is the key to have real instance rendering ....

Regards,

[ThirdEye]

Yes, C4D can save the GI solution. About HVoxels... C4D has Pyrocluster which sadly isn't a so powerful solution, it's one of C4D weak point imo.

[Per-Anders]

Cinema 4D SDK fully supports volumetric objects and shaders. However not many plugin developers have explored this avenue. There are a number of volumetric "surface type" shaders, and a few "volume type"/voxel things but not very many. But for instance Shave & Haircut has a volumetric mode. And i just think that your instancing thing may just have been something that no-one has been ingenious to think of for c4d! (although having said that maybe shave will do volumetric instancing with it's geometry instancing mode... however shave is one of the ways to really really slow down a render, so maybe that wouldn't be a good way to go to get tons of geometry into your scene, and it's random of course). Anyhow, the point being, it would be possible for the right plugin developer to do yes.

[STRAT]

good thread lads :)

why not try normal GI rendering in c4d with a accuracy set to 100% and about 100 samples? that should also produce super results with comparable, if not faster, render times to the stoch mode rendering.

i have my dual xeon to do my rendering, so i pick and choose which gi rendering method suits my particular job at the time. each is pretty fast.

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