Railclone optimization

[Ignacio]

Hello,

I am a new RailClone user and I am working on a huge scene with lots of roads.

I have been using forest pack for ages and I have never had any problems when scattering any tree on a huge surface but when it comes to railclone, it seems that if I select the library presets for a pathway for example, the viewport performance is fine but when I press the Corona interactive rendering or the render button, it takes a lot of time and most of the times it crashes.

I also have read many post on this forum about performance and slow render times but I have not been able to fixed this issue yet, so I am wondering if I should make a Low poly pathway instead of the super complex library presets or if is there any workaround. I had to increase the max faces to 999999M to avoid the warning pop-up, as someone suggested on another post. I am using Max2020 and Corona.

Thank you,
Ignacio

[Paul Roberts]

Hi Ignacio,

Could you let me know which style you are using please? Some styles use features that for technical reasons are not supported by Corona without disabling instancing. Where these features are used this happens automatically and might account for unexpectedly high polycounts. In addition, any geometry that is deformed (bent around corners for example) will also not be able to be instanced since it would need to be unique.

In these cases, I'd recommend creating a lower poly asset and avoid using certain features (mainly automatic UVW box mapping, UVW Xform operator, and Material Operator) to maintain instances as much as possible.

Thanks,
Paul

[Ignacio]

Hello Paul and thank you for your prompt reply.

The styles that I am using that are killing the scene are:
- 1 Flagstone Paving + tree basins
- 2 Pattern Paving 2 + Red Cycle Lane + Basins

Looking forward to your reply, I could share the scene if needed, very simple scene at the moment.
Best,

Ignacio

[Paul Roberts]

Hi Ignacio,

Thanks for the extra information. It doesn't look as though those styles use any features that would disable instancing in Corona, so I would assume that the spline has several bends that cause the geometry to be deformed and instancing is disabled for this reason. If that's the case I would recommend modelling something lower poly. If the spline doesn't have many bends that could cause this, please feel free to send me the file (helpdesk@itoosoft.com) and I'd be happy to take a closer look.

Many thanks,
Paul

[Ignacio]

Hello Paul,

I have just submitted the file to the email your provided me.

Hope you can take a closer look.

Best,
Ignacio

[Paul Roberts]

Hello Ignacio,

Thanks for your scene file. It is as I suspected. Because the spline is curved and projected onto a surface then every paving slab is being slightly deformed to follow the curves. Since deformed geometry cannot be instanced this explains why the style is losing efficiency. You could try opening the style editor and disabling Deform>Bend and Slice for all the segments. This worked pretty well for me,  but the style may not bend so well around some of the corners. You should definitely do this for the streetlights too. If you do need to deform the geometry though, I would suggest swapping the segments for something much lower poly in this case.

Best,
Paul

[Ignacio]

Hello Paul,

Thank you for the detailed explanation and for checking my scene, I will try to replicate what you did.

In the meantime I have been editing the original meshes to a super low poly ones just in case.

Best,
Ignacio