Big time Renders

[Sampdoria]

I was asked to do the dreaded Aerial scenario of a housing scheme.

 

As usual I trimmed down my building block, wblocked it and placed it onto a mass modelled scene where I had done the Roads, Massing, Tonnes of Landscaping, etc the previous day.

 

With 2 building blocks, Nxt was rendering well and a very impressive Pathtracer Render look.

 

I decided to just go for all 8.

 

So I copy and pasted all which meant 8 Building Blocks (Each Block is 3 Buildings).

 

- The usual bug of many components already Blocked in the Building Block lost their Assignments.

- When I Rendered with 8 Building Blocks (Not exploded), The file has rendered amazingly well at 110 Passes in 3 Hours. (3000x2100)

- When I exploded the Blocks in order to Remove Assignments from Block (in order to get the Assignments by Layers re-enacted) - the File explodes to 180Mb. Then of course, it crashes when trying to render.

 

At the Moment Im working by rendering in Components and assembly in Pshop.

 

Any Idea if Im missing a trick on this Loss of Material issue?

 

Attached is a Works in Progress with FX, As you can see, some blocks are still in the progress of being added.

 

Most of all, Im really happy with what NXT is giving us here. Even 3DMax would not be Stable handling something like this.

 

Birdman

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

If you've got something that crashes consistently on a 64 bit platform, I'm very interested.  Complexity should not cause a crash, there's very likely something else going on.

[Sampdoria]

Hi Roy, even though the System is 64 Bit, the AutoCad 2008 and Nxt are 32 Bit.

 

Im very excited and waiting for the firm to get a 64 Bit CAD because as you had mentioned, it will increase Output by quite a bit.

 

Does Nxt work well on 2010 64 Autocad?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Ah-- you're definitely pushing the edges with the system you have.  A 64-bit system will allow you to render much more complex models and higher resolutions.  Generally speaking, it won't be faster, but it does remove the 3GB limitation that exists for 32-bit systems which is what you're bumping into right now.

 

Yes, nXt works great on 2010 64 (or any other 64 bit version of AutoCAD.)

 

[Chas / Aug Posekany]

not that ot will help you current problem but,......

I believe if you have 32 bit 2008 you should be able to get 64 bit 2008 at no additional cost.

[Wayne Williamson]

From my experience an x-ref does not perform any better than having a single instance in the drawing. If items are in blocks the first several instances still imact rendering speed to a point. I think I have seen Roy give five as the treshold for NXT (I could be wrong but thats what I remember). At some point the impact of repeating a block seems to have little impact though. I've had several renderings where I have plantings as blocks with random rotation and they impacted the files rendering speed very little, eventhough they numbered in the hundreds.

 

So in short I have seen no benefit from x-refs for rendering speed although for pure autocad drawing there is, however I have seen big benefit from blocking repeated objects. I have not notice any benefit from single blocks or blocks that are repeated just a couple times.

 

Again this is my experience, but I assume others would find similar results.

[akinlolu olugboji]

For projects like this I always use Xref. As to your materials assignments, one you use the remove material button in Nxt(to the orign files)  it updates in the Xref scene (be sure the visretain variable is set to zero and not one)

[Sampdoria]

Tx, I have finishes a submission and want to check out the Xref approach. Cheers

[Sampdoria]

I tried the X-Ref method and it seems to be much more stable and has solved the Loss of Material Problem. I just now need to try updating my X-Ref once I have used 12 instances of it in the mother file.

 

regards