June 16, 2010

Practical 3D Tips #2; Need your scene simplified quickly?

This tip is for the people (like me) that love to load up our scenes with all sorts of junk so that they look as real as possible; whether we see them on camera at a specific time or not.

Your polygon count skyrockets, your materials are so complicated that a small piece of them takes ten minutes to render, and you’re ready to resign yourself to the sad truth that that particular piece is unrenderable. Don’t do anything; here’s what might fix it without impacting on quality.

Hiding the objects you can’t see will remove the extra calculations your program has to make, speeding up the creation and rendering process.

Can’t work because of the detail

Complex 3D environments and scenes take a lot of processing power and memory, particularly when it comes to rendering. Sometimes they can be so complicated that even working on the scene takes forever; have you ever had to wait longer than five seconds for a mouse move to register? You’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. You spend more time waiting on your changes to update than you do making the changes, and you keep getting more and more stressed out by the state of things. Deadlines start to collapse, pressure gets piled on, and you begin to contemplate throwing your monitor out of the nearest window.

Complex scene? No problem.

Wouldn’t it be so much more enjoyable if you were able to keep that level of complexity and detail on camera while ensuring your computer didn’t hang up over the slightest movement? Imagine being able to tweak things without having a super computer, being able to walk away from a render without worrying it’ll crash. Or being able to save without the program failing, your computer rebooting, and losing large amounts of work. You’d meet your deadlines far easier, there’d be less pressure on you, and your poor abused monitor won’t have to learn to fly.

Action Steps:

1. Look at your scene; what doesn’t appear on the camera?
2. Select all the objects that don’t actually appear, right click, and select ‘Hide’.
3. Enjoy being able to move around your scene with greater ease!

Conclusion

This method won’t work on every type of scene; only the ones in which you have a lot of clutter out of view of the camera. You can do something similar by assigning objects to layers and hiding the layers you don’t require while you’re working for a greater level of control.

However this is the quickest way to save your file if it becomes too crowded suddenly. Try it, let me know if it helps. I use it on all but my simplest environment scenes and it works for me.

Heather, the owner, started Shades of a Dream in January 2010 to help you fill gaps and increase your knowledge in 3D and Visual Effects. She also runs a newsletter; want a little extra punch? Sign up here