I’ve been scouring the forums and web but I haven’t been able to find any answers on this so would appreciate any advice or some links to info.
Basically, how are ZB users managing to render out complex scenes with many high-res objects in mental ray, specifically in Maya? I’ve noticed that even trying to render out a single object that has to be subdivided into the 2,000,000+ poly range makes mental ray crash frequently. Since that is the case, I’m curious how people are handling complex characters/scenes that use many objects, large textures, displacement and normal maps.
I’m also curious how you are all managing to get the high frequency details to cross over from ZB into the final render. I’ve found it damn near impossible to use low res base meshes (as suggested by many) and come close to achieving this level of detail. The closest I’ve come to matching an object in ZB in a maya/mental ray render has been to export the object on L3 or L4 where it is over 100,000 polys, generate the displacement map from there, and then generate the normal map from maybe 2 levels below the highest level. I also split up my object into multiple UV quadrants and used duplicate shaders with unique 4k maps for color, displacement and normals. It’s close but not quite there and I’m pushing MR to the breaking point. I am using .map files for displacement, and I’ve tried various formats for normals including tif and tga. Even renderman for maya has crapped out frequently.
While that does work to a certain point, it’s getting to the point where MR gives fatal errors sometimes because of the heavy tessellating. Disabling CCmesh seems to speed things up and give better results. I’ve been testing this mostly on the Mac side in Maya 2009 and am wondering if it’s just the 32-bit limitations of maya causing problems because it can’t use all of my RAM. I’ve rendered complex dynamics scenes in 64-bit on windows xp (on this same machine) that had over 30 million polygons and 200,000 objects, but it was a mass amount of instanced objects only using normal maps, not displacements. Even so, it was using 30 GB of RAM per frame but it did render.
I should also mention that I tried using Large BSP an BSP2 and they would also fail.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to figure this out for weeks and would appreciate a point in the right direction for general info on the proper workflow for heavy scenes with high detail, the ideal file formats, if doing multi-quadrant the best sizes to use, etc.
Thanks