Forest Pack > Forest Pro (*)

FPP, Corona animated proxies and scene parsing/prep time

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Abstract Canvas:
Hey All,

I was hoping someone may be able to help with this issue or have come across it before in their travels.

I've a fairly straight forward garden scene. I have some fairly high poly animated tree proxies that I have scattered using latest Forest pack v7.1.1 and suffering with large parsing times. Use Max 2021, Corona 6.0 (use an AMD3990x and had issues with hotfix 0.1 and 0.2 halfling render times, I've been snowed under so not had time to chase this issue), 128gb ram.

I've narrowed the issue down to the FPP scatters of the animated proxies. If I use any other mode other than disabled or follow, Parsing and preparing geometry times go from 2 minutes - 10 minutes. Which is a lot of time to suck up per frame.

This could easily be my fault in something I've done but thought I'd put it out there and see if anyone has come across it. I'm rendering a test animation, not the final so will stick with "Follow" for these and see how it looks. May be fine, but worth finding out a weakness if its there and being able to fix it for the future as randomisation would be nice.

Some of the steps I've taken to reduce these times:
- Corona proxies set to Mesh so that they stay in RAM (parsing issue happened regardless of this, i know this almost negates the proxy benefit but they are the most full proof method ive found for reliably using GrowFX animated geometry)
- Windows Page File increased to 40GB (old tip on Corona Forum, didn't have any effect)
- Optimised visible distances on all FPP objects.
- Turned off FPP Camera clipping (this is an odd one as it decreased parsing times for the ground cover, not by much though and this scatter isn't animated anyway, again just trying to limit FPP calc times)

It took me quiet a bit of time to narrow it down to the animation settings in Forest Pack. It was one of those "one by one" tasks until i found the culprit. I wasted a good amount of hours faffing with PheonixFD as at first i was convinced it was that as it was the latest install.  ;D

If anyone needs more info, happy to provide. Thanks in advance for any help.

iToo:
Hi, this is a known issue with Corona proxies.

In order to use animated samples, Forest needs to request to the proxy its mesh at different animation times. This is done using a specific Max function (GetRenderMesh), which is very slow with Corona proxies.
Although the mesh is not needed for the render itself (because proxies are rendered directly by the engine), it's necessary for other processes (i.e. to build the Forest point-cloud).

For example, with V-Ray proxies 'GetRenderMesh' is very fast, because it returns the simplified mesh used for viewport.
Instead, Corona computes and returns the full mesh stored in the proxy, and this process takes a lot of time.

We contacted with the Corona team some time ago, to request an alternative way to get a quick mesh from the proxy. They took note of our suggestion, but i think never was implemented.

Please let us some time to return to this topic. We'll make some tests and will ask to Corona guys again.

Abstract Canvas:
Hi Carlos,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I'm just glad to hear it wasn't me being dense and doing something obviously stupid.  ;D
I will keep an eye on this for updates. It works ok as long as I don't go to complex with the proxies, too high poly or too many different proxies is a no no with random samples at the moment so will stick to follow. Its working well enough for now but would certainly good for the future that you weren't penalised too harshly for using a feature. I hope the team at Corona Renderer come through.

Thanks again.

Curtis

3DFLOW:
Any clues as to wether this has been improved? We could benefit from this... We do Arch Viz and the vegitation of Forest Pack Pro is starting to become a bottleneck. Is the Corona dev. team rather leaning towards the C-scatter for usage, or can we keep investing our time in FPP. This plugin has become more annoying to work with, in conjunction with the Corona renderer.

Is there any at all improvements in sight.. If so... From who, where...

Should we request the Corona dev.-team, the Forest Pack Pro dev.-team, the Adesk dev.-team...

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=33580.0

iToo:
We are in contact with the Corona team to improve this issue.
Although it may take some time, because requires changes both in Forest and Corona Renderer.

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