Any way to cache camera visibility culling for animation?

[Rawalanche]

Hi,

i am currently working on a huge environment animation scattering foliage over 4*4km surface. I am pushing instancing abilities of the renderer to it's limits, and it seems that using Limit to visibility feature seems to help a bit with scene parsing and memory management, but problem is i get random flickering in scenes as objects outside of the camera frustrum are popping up, and so are the shadows they are casting into visible area. Same problem goes for trees in reflections.

So i was just wondering if there is any way to cache the camera visibility over animation segment. So that you could sort of "bake" the visible area, so that instances would not be added or removed during animated segment, but there would not be more instances in the scene than there need to be.

If it's not possible, then it would perhaps be a good idea for a new feature.

Thanks,
Ludvik

[iToo]

Hi, no such feature doesn't exist in Forest, although really i don't see how it would help. I mean, if you cannot edit manually the clipping area, there is not benefit baking it. The result will be the same.

I think in this case you need a more precise way to define the clipping area. There are several tricks for that:

- Adjust the view area using Camera->Expand and Camera->Back Offset.
- Same using Camera->Density and Scale falloff.
- Instead Camera clipping, create a spline to define the view limits and link it to the camera. In this way:



Also remember there are other tools to optimize render time on huge areas, as Forest LOD. It lets you not only to define a low-poly model for far trees, but also replace them with billboards or use simpler materials.

I hope that helps.

[Rawalanche]

Hi,

I tried using back offset but it does not help. Any other solutions you posted won't really help either i am afraid. Sooner or later there always is something that pops up somewhere in reflection, or when it's outside but cast shadow inside of the camera frame.

What i mean is that ultimately, every solution that relies on adding or deleting instances during animated sequence will fail. So i was looking for something that would not remove nor add any instances during entire sequence, but would place instances on surface camera sees during entire time segment, not just in current frame.

Think of it as a limit to visibility feature, but it would not place instances on visible area of only the current frame, but rather entire segment.

I sort of did that already. I created include area spline, and then i moved my timeline each 10 rames, and adjusted the spline to extend forest to the area i see. I did that manually for 1000 frame animation, and it was very tedious process, and it also was not nearly as accurate as forest camera clipping.