Scattering millions of objects

[ak-sam]

Hi Guys

I'm loving the scatter editor.

But I'm facing a strange problem when the scattered components become very numerous.

From one sketchup model, I could export two scenes . When doing so, I export “selected” thereby ensuring Skindigo doesn’t process unseen/unecessary objects.

The first scene, with 100,000 components (each with numerous subcomponents) may export in 1 second.
The second scene may include a different set of components (eg, shrubs, instead of grass) and take 3 HOURS to export. One model I had took 11 hours..it sits on "collecting instances" for a long time, "exporting instances" for a very very long time.

So I'd like to know if there are any rules for making quick exports.
- Should I explode all sub-components/groups?
- Should I ensure material size is minimal on scattered objects?
- Should I reduce geometry on scattered components?
- Is there a total number that is being hit as a 'limit'?

I may do some testing to work it out..but its not so easy in this case.
Thanks.
Sam.

[Oscar J]

I guess you're using the latest version of skindigo and Indigo?

[ak-sam]

Indigo:
v3.8.26, 64 bit

Skindigo:
3.8.25.3


I'm also facing an issue where the scattering is not respecting the origin point (0,0,0 axis) of the component being scattered.
EG,
Imagine you have a component tree. Its trunk is above ground and its roots are blow. The component's axis is set to ground level.
You want to scatter the trees on a surface called 'ground'
When scattered, the tree instances are all rendered with their trunks AND roots are above ground, with the deepest roots touching the ground surface.

[ak-sam]

Hi All

I'm still having problems with scattering/instancing. I have tried Indigo 4 and the result is identical.

Basically my models are taking many hours to process, before beginning rendering.

I accept that my models are fairly large and complex - vegetation is sometimes scattered, which I understand takes a while to process. That's OK, but I do need to understand what I can do to reduce processing times, or make the process more robust and predictable (so at least I can run them overnight).

On previous versions of Indigo/Skindigo I seem to remember processing more than one scene simultaneously by having two or more sketchup windows open on my PC and exporting from both. This was a major time savings. Now, when I try to do this, as soon as one scene has processed, Indigo generates the following message (and I have to exit without saving any progress):
_____________
A problem occurred with the scene:
Scene parsing error: CreateFile failed for path 'C:/Users/sac/AppData/Roaming/Indigo Renderer/default.igs': The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
(error code=32)
No Metadata.
Indigo version: Indigo Renderer v3.8.31, Windows 64-bit build.
No metadata.
Please contact support@indigorenderer.com if you have any questions.
__________

Tryng to export a scene with a unique file name (other than default/.igs) doesn't help. The message still appears, because apparently default.igs is still "in use:"

The issue could possibly be avoided if we could export PIGS straight from Skindigo. At least we could utilise multiple skindigos to export multiple scenes, then manually load them into indigo windows.

I find it very frustrating that Indigo gives no accurate depiction of how long an operation will take.
Eg, "exporting materials" or "collecting instances" can take many hours, but there's no counter or progress bar. I don't know which objects are taking the longest time to process or if certain objects are 'buggy'.

Once I have exported a scene, in theory, the subsequent export of that scene should be very fast (instant, even), but this is not the case. Even without changing any settings, the save view seems to take just as long to process as it does the first time.

Once the scene has finished exporting, Indigo sometimes has an error that stops it from loading. (eg the posted error above - but there are other examples). I'm not aware of any way to 'rescue' the scene at this point, so it must be re-exported again.

Once the scene begins loading, Indigo has a progress bar on the bottom of the window. That bar usually takes a few minutes to load the scene up to 100% but will then just sit there unresponsive with the message "loading ...default.igs" . It can be in this state for many hours.

During these operations I know my PC is working because one of the CPU cores is active, and Indigo's memory use is changing by a few KB per second. My PC is an intel extreme edition with 64gb RAM...it should be pretty rapid.

The actual rendering is usually pretty quick..half an hour or so to get a nice image. It's sped up greatly in the last 12 months of indigo releases. Pure GPU rendering is also fast and saves me about 10 minutes (30%) on each render, but if I'm waiting 6 hours for a scene to even begin rendering, a 10 minute savings is not very useful.

PS The model I am working on now has 3 million edges and 30,000 component instances in Sketchup. I've rendered it successfully so I know there are no serious bugs.
Within Indigo, Triangles are 386,000,000 and unique triangles are 1,590,000. Dynamic objects are 450,000.

I'd love to know if there's anyone in the same position to me, who has found some good ways to get a faster workflow on large models. Its very frustrating having the power of Indigo but having to revert to using basic 2D vegetation, because my beautiful hand-made 3d trees take so long to export!


Thanks!