Rendering Pflow with large amount of instanced particles

#1

Hi there,

I´m trying to cover a floor with dust/Dirt (very close up) with Pflow, but I can´t seem to render it…

I have a bunch of Dust objects in a group used as shape instance, upward of 100.000 Particles I´m getting good coverage in the viewport, but once I hit render I run out of memory pretty soon.

I checked “Single” in the Render operator, since I don´t want pflow to attach 100.000 Particles at rendertime.

I also tried meshing the whole thing via the mesher, but that only meshes some of the particles (maybe 10 percent).

Since the floor isn´t visible completely in the camera view I also thought about creating some sort of camera clipping, so far I tried linking a cone that is covering the camera view to the camera and using that to volume select faces in the emitter mesh, but that only works partially, since I emit all particles at frame 0 and since the camera moves…
Well, this would probably be a good reason to get forest pack, but since this isn´t per se a commercial project, my boss wants me to try and get it done without other plugins…

Any ideas what else to try here?

#2

are you rendering with vray or scanline?

vray 3.0 sp1 just came out and they’ve got something called vray instancer, which is like a vray proxy object for pflow. :slight_smile: This would solve your issue.

Also try rendering this dust pass in scanline…

#3

Try using the Camera Culling operator. It is worth a shot.

#4

Well, can´t render in scanline since I was planning on shading the dust particles with VraySSS material…
Like I said, the “Dust” is actually really close up and not just some fuzzy stuff I could easily fake…

The Vrayinstancer sound promising, since I can´t install the update yet though, do any of you know how this actually works?

Like: Do I just select the pflow, run the instancer and pick object to be instanced? Can I pick multiple objects as instances like with the shape instance modifier?

Camera Culling Op also sounds nice, but I guess that is a thinkbox only op, or is it a data op preset…?

#5

Damnit, found the camera cullin op via google, but seems like it hasn´t been updated to max 2015 and the old version doesn´t seem to work. Dropped it into he plugins folder and only get error (procedure not found or something like that)…

#6

The VRayInstancer is a helper object that just has two selection lists: One for the particle systems and one for the instanced objects. It uses position, scale and rotation data from the particles (so your particle system doesn’t need any more PFlow operators than these).

#7

Camera Culling is part of base PFlow. It has been since gees forever. :slight_smile: Let me be more specific, it has been available as a freebie since I believe max7, it was integrated into max when Box#3 went to ADM in 2014.

#8

yep Johnny is right. Definitely there in 2015. :wip:

#9

yep Johnny is right. Definitely there in 2015

Huh. It´s not like I don´t believe you or anything…but…
What do I need to do to use it then?
Can´t find it in the operators list here…

I also read up on the new vrayinstancer and even though it can´t replace the objects in my pflow with exact instances of itself( different random retribution of same objectlist is possible though), meaning my collisions won´t be completely correct, I think i can also live with the results. One of those “issues” probably noone ever will notice but I´m annoyed because I know they are there…

#10

Read up in the manual as well…so I guess it really should be there, but it ain´t…:frowning:

Now I´m sad.

#11

thats pretty strange! Take a screenshot of your entire pflow operator depot. Not that I don’t believe you :stuck_out_tongue:

Are you running 3dsmax or max design? though it probably shouldn’t matter :frowning:

#12

Here is an example flow, it is a Default Op (I do have Krakatoa and RF installed too) I attached a sample scene too:

#13

I attached a screen of your Pflow setup, where you can see that I´m obviously missing all of the freebie ops…

Weird.
Hope there is a way to get that ops back without fresh install…:frowning:

#14

That is a bummer. Check your PM.