Cinema 4D Roadshow 2016 - Adapting Warm Winter for Octane: Optimizing the Project for GPU Rendering

Photo of Patrick Goski

Instructor Patrick Goski

Share this video
  • Duration: 15:17
  • Views: 2426
  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

In this video you will learn the ins and outs of optimizing the geometry in the project (This includes converted geometry and that created by generators) for use with a GPU based rendering solution.

In this video you will learn the ins and outs of optimizing the geometry in the project (This includes converted geometry and that created by generators) for use with a GPU based rendering solution. While Octane is the focus of this series, the information in this section is useful for just about any render engine.

Note: There may be texture errors with the scene files, but all textures required for the conversion to octane are included.

show less

Transcript

- Okay. In this video, we're going to take a look at how we can optimize the scene, so that it has a reduced memory footprint. If we start by going to the Display and switching to something like Quick Shading Lines, you'll see that the scene is really quite heavy. And for a lot of what we're doing in the render, we don't need to have this much detail. There's also a lot of geometry that's being excluded behind the mountains here. If we go to the Camera View...and just forgive me because this is going to be a little bit slow here. We can see that as we zoom out, the scene is really quite dense. And if we keep going further, we have all these mountains here as well. Once the wireframe draws, we can't really see too much. So, at the moment, this is all going to be pushed to the GPU, and this is a lot of data for that to handle. So, let's start with going through the scene then. We'll just start by removing everything from the Object Manger using the Layer browser here. We can also remove everything from the viewport. This way, it's going to be easier for us to just focus on the things that we want. Let's start with the flower here. We'll bring in the flower as well as all the geometry there. We'll simply go to the Move Tool and select the petals, then we can hit S on the keyboard here to scroll to the active object, and we'll see that we have our two main petals. If we dive down here, actually, let's Ctrl+click, Ctrl+click again so that we unfold all. We can take the Subdivision Surfaces here, and we're just going to reduce these, so Editor will set to zero. Even with the Renderer there, we can set that to zero. Because we're still getting a fairly good definition on the edge here, which is what we'll notice the most, not so much the inner details. If we want, we can try bringing this up later on, though. Next, we'll click on the inner petals there. Hit S again, and then we can Ctrl+click on that to unfold all, and we'll set these to zero as well. It looks like there's a second one there, so we'll set that to zero. We could just disable these as well, but that is currently controlled by the Xpresso rig that's controlling the animation of the flower. So, in this case, we're just changing the attributes. Next, we'll get the stamen here. Select them and hit S, and we have all of these inners. We'll just Ctrl+click on the minus sign there. Ctrl again to unfold all, and we'll take all of these profile circles, and we'll set those to Uniform, and maybe like a value of six in there, so that we're still getting pretty good detail, but you can see just how much that reduces the amount of geometry that was being created. We can also take these Center Splines here, and we'll just set those to Uniform, rather than Adaptive. That gives us pretty good results for just that. Next, we want to deal with these leaves, so we select them, hit S, and we have our outer petals. These are going to be controlled here, and we'll set this to zero as well, just because, again, that outer edge is already well-defined. We have the stem, and this one, it's not going to be a big change but we can still reduce it a little bit by going to Uniform. And we'll set this to six. It's taking just a little bit out of that. Then we'll do these leaves here. Select the leaf, hit S, and we can then select both of these cloth objects, and we'll set the Subdivision on those to zero, and the same thing with this one here. Okay. Just like that, we have significantly reduced the amount of geometry that we're using for the flower without really reducing the visual quality of it too much. The next section that we're going to take a look at is the ground. Go back to our Layers, and we can remove the flower from the Object Manager. But we'll keep it in view just so that we have a reference to where things are. We'll also turn on the Scene Objects here. This way, we have an idea of where our camera is situated so we had an idea of our movement. And if we go to, like, a later frame here, you'll see that the camera is eventually going to be looking, kind of, down this direction here along the Z-axis. We will bring the Snow Terrain back so that it's visible here, and you can just see how dense this gets. If we look at our camera, it's looking this way, and we're barely going to notice any detail on these back planes here. We can actually select these, and you'll notice it's not showing in the Object Manager. Let's just bring this in and then we can hit S, and we can see our Floor Terrain objects there. And let's start with fairly low settings here. We'll go like 200x20, maybe even less there. We can go like 150, 100. We're going to go with fairly aggressive reductions there. This one, we can bring up a bit, just because it is going to be a little bit closer to the camera. Let's go, like, 250 and 100. And then, this one back here, let's do the same thing, 250 and 100. Let's go with, like, 60. Yeah that's not so bad, and let's go 60 here as well. So there we go. That has been reduced a fair amount. The next thing that we want to do is select all of these because we're going to delete any of the geometry that we don't want to see. And the reason that we're going to delete the geometry rather than just make these shorter is so that we maintain the UVs that we were using for the textures. Okay. So We will right-click and we'll go to our Current State To Object, and then hit Delete. So now, we have all of these as polygon objects. Now, I want to delete anything that is blocked by the mountains and stuff like that. So, we'll go back to the layers, and we'll just turn on the Mountain MidGround. At this point, you can see that quite a bit of the ground planes here are obscured by the mountains. I'm going to go to Point Mode, and then choose the Lasso Selection, and just make sure that the Only Select Visible Elements is off, and then, we will just select anything that is beyond the mountains there. And we'll do the same thing for the other side, and like that, we're done. We'll then select these ones here, and we're going to do a similar thing, except we're just going to select anything that might not be visible to the camera, and will be partially obscured by the mountains as well. We can kind of go like that, and if we kind of zoom in here and look through our camera, we're not going to notice a huge difference getting rid of those points there. We can delete those as well. There we go. At this point, the ground or the terrain has been reduced quite a bit. The next thing that we'll take a look at is reducing the geometry on the mountains. Dealing with the mountains is going to be a very similar process. We'll start by going to the layers and we will hide the Snow Terrain from the Object Manager here. And then, we'll start with the Mountain MidGround. These are all the mountains that are going to be right, front, and center for us. If we switch the Move tool, we can select those, and there we go. Now, each one of these mountains is inside of a Subdivision Surface. What we want to do is just select the geometry itself and we will pull that out of those Subdivision Surfaces and delete them. We can also get rid of this one hidden object. So, we're just dealing with the objects that we have in the scene now. Next, we can start with any of the mountains, and go to Point Mode. What we want to do is remove any of the points that are not going to be visible to the camera. So we'll go to our Lasso tool here and select a section of points on the back side of the mountain, and then just hit Delete. We're going to do this across several of these objects here. So this one here, same thing. We'll select as many points on the back as we can, and then hit Delete. And finally, on this one here, the exact same process. Now, there's going to be some stuff when you delete all of this that you noticed you can also get rid of. Like this one, actually, goes under these other mountains, so we can reach under there and delete extra geometry. Along this backside, we can get rid of all of that. Now, the process to finish off the other side is exactly the same. In this case, we will just do a little bit of a timelapse so that you can continue watching the process as we go along. Okay. So, once we have deleted all of the excess geometry for the mountains in the foreground here, we want to do the exact same thing for the background. We'll start by removing the MidGround Mountains from the Object Manager. Then, bring up the Background Mountains, and we can also show those in the Viewport here. They're hiding somewhere. They're there. Again, it's the exact same process as we were using before. We'll start with going into each one of these. We can Ctrl+click and unfold all. Well, see that we have several objects in here that were used during the construction. We're just going to delete those. Then, we can go in and start removing the excess geometry. Again, we will just do a timelapse here because this does take a little bit of time. But pretty much just go through your hierarchy and remove whatever you can because all of this is geometry that you could be using somewhere else, or may actually help you render a scene that you couldn't render before. We'll just keep going here. Okay. And so, just like that, we have reduced the amount of geometry on the Background Mountains as well. With the mountains completed, we're getting pretty close to having the optimization complete here. The last thing that we need to look into are the Fracture objects as well as the stems that grow out of those. Again, we're just going to start with our background mountains. We will remove those from the Object Manager, and we'll bring in the Ground Fracture. We'll show those so that they're visible in the Viewport as well. Now, we're just going to Ctrl+click on that, so we unfold all. We can go to the Subdivision Surface here. Unfortunately, with the subdivisions on this, because it is relying so heavily on the Subdivision Surface to get nice round edges, the Render Subdivisions do need to be fairly high. If we take a look at the Editor, we can see that once we get around three, it's definitely very smooth. We might be able to get away with two and still have something that we enjoy. Then, we'll just set the Subdivision Renderer to two. That way, on the render, this will be subdivided. But for the Viewport, it's going to stay nice and clean. Now, we want to do this for the remaining ground fracture Subdivision Surfaces so we can select each one and to just adjust them as needed. And so here, we have the last one, and go zero and two. There we go. Now, things are going to be a lot smoother in the Viewport. And for the rendering, since we freed up so much geometry from all the other areas, it's okay to have the Subdivision Surfaces on the Fracture here because we have a lot of extra headroom. Now, the last thing is going to be the stems. Let's just bring those back into view as well. These are fairly simple. Let's jump to the last frame in the animation. We just want to take a little bit of geometry out of them. We'll open up each one here, and we'll start with the circles. Then, in here, we'll set this to Uniform and we'll go with, like, six, maybe even four. Since we're never getting up close to these, we don't need to have a lot of geometry there. Maybe even like two, since they are really kind of background elements. Okay. So, at this point, we have completed optimizing the scene geometry. We can take a look at actually creating the materials in Octane.
Resume Auto-Scroll?