Breaking apart a scene prop?
So i have a scene and when I export to Blender, it's essentially failing to begin the render. As it loads elements and materials (pre-render) I can see the GPU memory going up and up. Once it hits ~2,500MB (within a few seconds) it just stops. I'm guessing it's because of my scene - how large it is and how much stuff I have in it. I've never had this issue before and I have a fairly powerful gaming PC with a GTX 670.
Is it possible to take that Daz3D scene prop and somehow ungroup all of the elements and literally delete the portions that aren't in the immediate area of the camera? In Daz3D, I tried selecting portions of the scene prop and deleting, but it would just delete the entire prop. Surely there has to be some sort of workaround.
Update: Swapping the render from GPU to CPU allows for Blender to begin the render. Just a shame I won't be able to render with GPU. Either way, my question still stands -- can you break apart a scene prop in Daz3D and remove portions? Anything to cut down on system resources.
Update 2: Well, I physically deleted the entire scene prop in Blender (to render an RGBA .png, and even that failed! Strange!
Update 3: Wow. I went into Daz3D, deleted the scene prop entirely, exported the rest and it's STILL failing. oO
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Geometry is only half the problem when rendering with GPU. In fact, I daresay that geometry is rarely even a problem at all, since it's all processed fairly fast and has a relatively small 'footprint' in graphics memory..
It sounds more likely that your problem is textures taking up a large amount of VRAM on your card, likely exceeding your graphics memory limits. I say this because your CPU rendering works fine, and CPU rendering allows you to use your system RAM for textures rather than relying solely on the graphics card.
It might be worth using lower resolution textures for distant objects, similar to how mipmaps work. The idea is that only the close up objects actually need that detail, so you can use lower resolutions for distant objects without impacting the scene quality, since you can see less of the object overall.
Thanks for chiming in!
I guess more than anything I'm a bit taken aback that my video card is having these issues with such a small scene. Kinda disappointing. But, I don't know, something weird is still going on. Even when I deleted the entire scene prop it was failing to even start the render with just 2 figures in an empty scene (RBGA).
I'll keep trying new things in hopes that I misclicked a Blender setting that's botching everything. Just so aggravating to spend hours on something, working on all those little details, for the render to not even start. =/
Going back to my original question - is it possible to take a scene prop and break it apart (to delete certain layers)? Conversely, if I have a figure and add the usual: clothing / materials / props to them, can I then save everything combined as a prop?
It certainly is. To do this you'll need to employ the use of the polygon group editor tool. Either select an area by surface or region or by clicking and dragging using one of the various options. Use the right click to bring up these options, and also to give you the important option. Polygon Visibility -> Hide. You can then, under polygon editing, choose to remove hidden faces which will delete all of the area which you had previously hidden.
I've used this technique a few times in my own work to give the impression of damaged areas or to avoid certain clipping issues.
Human skins tend to be quite large - Genesis has separate maps for the head, limbs and torso all of which tend to be on the order of 4,000 pixels square, and there are often diffuse, bump or displacement, and specular maps at least - that's already a lot of data. If your figures are clothed you might be able to completely remove the torso maps (though of course you are then using clothing maps, which may also be large). You can also look at using procedural maps, or smaller tiling texture maps, for things like metals and fabrics.
How much RAM does your video card have?
Thanks for this! I actually found the hide feature on my own, but never tried removing the hidden faces afterwards. :)
Pretty sure it's 2GB. Well, at least I know my limitations for a scene render. I suppose I don't need to be rendering 3-4 bodies in a complex scene prop. I will stick to just one subject for now. Thanks for your help!
Richard, say I want to add full body clothing to a figure I've already added custom hair, eyes, skin, etc – what's the most efficient way to turn off the body textures that aren't needed anymore for the render (because of the clothing)? Is it simply a matter of selecting each region of the body I want to turn off and going into the Surfaces tab (I think) and removing any sort of image map I see in the list?
Just not sure if there's an easier way, like a 'turn off all unseen textures' feature or something...
Thanks!
You may want to try Texture Atlas to consolidate a figures texture to one map, more like they would be done for a game model.
You could just load the plain, untextured Genesis base, then save a Materials preset (File>Save as>Materials preset), call it something like Plain torso, and in the options dialogue make sure you have only the surfaces starting with 2 checked (those are the body areas, the head starts with 1 and the limbs with 3 etc. You could also clear the inner mout textures if the figure's mouth is closed, again saving a preset with the mouth parts only checked (that's all the surfaces starting with 4).