Upgrade

[M_SON]

Hi guys and sorry because this topic is just related with corona<

I want to improve my workstation because the lack of space drive and ram, especially when the scene reaches 20mil polygons is difficult to keep working on it and the errors start to appear, errors like; 1. I can't move my materials or their children in library, 2. All my external user paths disappear (have to add them again), 3. The programs just take few extra seconds or minutes when i modify any material, or 4. When i'm trying to copy materials from a scene to another through fbx, the material is exported without all the maps.

This is my workstation:

CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1080
SSD: Samsung 860 Evo 1TB
SSD: Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB
HDD: WD Blue 1TB (2012)
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2400 C14 2x16GB
MBD: MSI Z370 SLI PLUS (MS-7B46) 

and I think that maybe another 32GB ram and 2TB HDD(I have left like 10% free space on each hdd/ssd) will help me to get better results especially when I'm working with plants and trees.

Ps. if you have any answer to any of those 4 of my problems, or what should I improve for a better response will be great.

Thanks a lot!

[sprayer]

You can't infinitely add models in one scene, if you making huge scene you need to optimize it, make it small and light as possible to work with it, so you can use proxies, xref, convert textures to jpg etc. And yes you need much free space, otherwise it may harm your ssd and system
Your CPU is fine for making scene, because modelling and other staff in 3ds max work on single core, here you need cpu with high Hz and performance in single thread, but for rendering you need many cores CPU what often have less Hz and slow performance in single task.

You may add RAM if it's not enough for your scene.

The problems what you describes do not looks like from lack of RAM or disk space.
FBX to store texture need to tick option embed media at exporting. If there is no free space on C disk program will crash. If not enough Ram programs will work slow and may be not stable.
Do not forget to clear max files with script, imparted models may have garbage what may slowing down work

[GeorgeK]

Hey M_SON, so when working with heavy scenes, optimization is the key.

Make sure to use proxies as mentioned before by sprayer, instancing of identical objects with differences in translation (scaling,rotation,etc.). And always focus the high-detail assets/textures close to your camera, keeping more optimized LOD's for the background if possible. Also usage  of  corona/scattering where applicable is preferred than simple mesh distribution.

[M_SON]

You can't infinitely add models in one scene, if you making huge scene you need to optimize it, make it small and light as possible to work with it, so you can use proxies, xref, convert textures to jpg etc. And yes you need much free space, otherwise it may harm your ssd and system
Your CPU is fine for making scene, because modelling and other staff in 3ds max work on single core, here you need cpu with high Hz and performance in single thread, but for rendering you need many cores CPU what often have less Hz and slow performance in single task.

You may add RAM if it's not enough for your scene.

The problems what you describes do not looks like from lack of RAM or disk space.
FBX to store texture need to tick option embed media at exporting. If there is no free space on C disk program will crash. If not enough Ram programs will work slow and may be not stable.
Do not forget to clear max files with script, imparted models may have garbage what may slowing down work

thank you sprayer, but I have 3 more question to your replay: 1. converting textures to jpeg, meaning that the textures that I'm using to be in a jpeg format? 2. I never saw an option to embed media at fbx exporting or the program just decide to do it or not regarding the disk space; 3. can you recommend me a good script to clear the files pls?

[M_SON]

Hey M_SON, so when working with heavy scenes, optimization is the key.

Make sure to use proxies as mentioned before by sprayer, instancing of identical objects with differences in translation (scaling,rotation,etc.). And always focus the high-detail assets/textures close to your camera, keeping more optimized LOD's for the background if possible. Also usage  of  corona/scattering where applicable is preferred than simple mesh distribution.

thank you GK, I'm using often CScatter, but sometimes because I wanna place different types of tree it's easily going up to 20mil, or a few weeks ago I had to use a ceiling lamp and that lamp had 60mil polys (will be a good idea to use ProOptimizer in that type of situations, or the object will be destroyed?)

[sprayer]

Yes converting texture to JPG will take less RAM, it's recommendation from autodesk.

Here an option in FBX https://i.imgur.com/UM0ciY5.jpg
It may not work with corona material. I recently export model with standard shader and textures and it opens in akeytsu fine.

here script, can be used as free https://3dground.net/prod/prune-scene-2180817
Frood may recommend another similar script)

And yes you should use prooptimzier especially if you are using this model for population

[romullus]

Yes converting texture to JPG will take less RAM, it's recommendation from autodesk.

Could you give a link to this recommendation? It would be intersting to see, because Corona devs said, that no matter what format your textures are, they will always take same amount of RAM when rendering. The only thing that matters is resolution, bit bepth and number of channels. I have no reasons to not believe them and my humble tests seems to confirm that.

[sprayer]

Sure here a link
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-to-optimize-performance-in-very-large-3ds-Max-scenes.html

Are you sure what you do not mistaken with game engines what converts all texture to dds? Is corona doing the same thing during parsing? If so i think parsing time will be much longer than now.
By the way JPG is only 8bit format.

[romullus]

Hmm, i've read it thoroughly and didn't find where it would be mentioned that JPG would use less RAM. Could it be that you misread something?

By the way JPG is only 8bit format.

Of course, but try to use 8 bit texture for displacement or some normal maps and you will find that 8 bits are nowhere enough :]

[romullus]

I found Ryuu's post about file formats and RAM consumption. https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=22406.msg137900#msg137900

[sprayer]

Paragraph 14 there it's for PSD but the same for Tif and Tga as they also may store layers and other information, as and jpg with transparency =3

For displacement map it's very rare where you can see difference between 8 and 16bit maps, because corona not for accurate close view displacement, you was make workaround video with displacement modifier and should know what fine texture it won't render, it will have jagged edges. Also corona team not recommended to use it for small details, so this is more for sculpt software.
By the way my post about displacement was not answered about coronabitmap loader displacement working very different(very small) compare to standard loader

[pokoy]

As a rule of thumb if you care about quality - stay away from jpeg because of compression artefacts, these will carry over to rendering. If you need to save HD space, use png.
Never go for lossy compression if you can avoid it.

[romullus]

For displacement map it's very rare where you can see difference between 8 and 16bit maps, because corona not for accurate close view displacement, you was make workaround video with displacement modifier and should know what fine texture it won't render, it will have jagged edges. Also corona team not recommended to use it for small details, so this is more for sculpt software.

Sorry, but i have to ask - are you serious about no difference in displacement between 8 bits and 16 bits? o_O

As for JPEGs, i see no problem to save colour maps to this format, although personally i don't do that - storage space is cheap, there's no excuse to permanently ruin your assets.

[sprayer]

romullus
Of cause i can see difference if you will make curve bricks for example, but i prefer to model it, and for mud terrain you won't see much difference like here
if texture between 0-255 color it's enough for this task
https://i.imgur.com/RjcOmXW.jpg

For very small detail displacement not work even with great texture you will see vertical topology because it's not vector displacement in full 3d axis
So i think depend of task of cause it's not bad idea too optimize scene with displacement too

[romullus]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so let's look at some pictures, shall we? Here i made 3 renders with identical settings, except that for displacement was used 4K 16bit TIFF, 4K 8bit JPG (highest compression quality) and 3K 16bit PNG textures respectively. 3K 16bit should use about the same amount of RAM, as 4K 8bit. As you can see difference between 4K 16bit and 3K 16 bit is virtually non existant, however 8bit JPG shows significant deterioration and also it renders longer (probably because of noisier displacement). So my advice would be - if you want to save RAM, better decrease your textures resolution, rather than its bit depth. That is true for diplacement and normal maps, other textures should be perfectly fine at 8 bits.

P.S. i included memory metrics in render stamp, in hope to see the RAM consumption difference, but for some reason, the difference was almost non existent, although by my calculations 4K 8bit and 3K16bit should use about 16MB less RAM than 4K 16bit. Max was restarted between each rendering, so conditions should be equal, but for some reason, savings were not there.