Instancing Odjects

All,

I am wondering if there is a way to instance objects in IRender nXt to reduce the processing of repeated object. I know you can do it with trees, but can it be any repeated object of your chosing. If so, how do you do it? If not, is this something that can be added to the next generation IRender nXt?

I ask because I have used a render program called Indigo Renderer and it has that option. It makes sense to me, but haven't see it in any other render program I have worked with.

Could be something effective. Just my two cents.

Nick

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Permalink Reply by Boothy on October 8, 2010 at 1:39pm

Hi Nick

Its has been discussed a lot here also - mainly on the old forum - I was going to provide links but my old links do not work anymore. As I remember the last post by the develpoer Al Hart suggested that that with the specific geometric extraction used by NXT instancing would not provide too many efficiencies - A lot of my interiors use a lot of repeats (chairs tables etc) and I also find the concept a good idea - Again I think it was suggested that rotation \move etc of same instanced object would be no more efficient in NXT - perhaps Al can expand - Al what happened to the old forum pages ?

Thanks

Boothy

EDit:It could have also had something to do with the 32 bit limits of SU - Boothy

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on October 8, 2010 at 1:53pm

Basically, instancing does not speed up rendering (unless you do not have enough RAM). It takes slightly more time to process instanced objects - since an additional transformation is required. It can save a lot of RAM. However, we almost never find a model which runs out of RAM and starts swapping. (Swapping will make things much, much slower)

Rich is working on a 64-bit version of the Batch Renderer. Again, 64 bits won't be any faster, but it will be able to use more RAM. This RAM will become more important when people start to use Lighting Channels on renderings at high resolution. Lighting channels don't slow things down much, but they can us a lot of RAM to store the additional 4-bytes per channel per pixel while you are rendering.

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Permalink Reply by N. Norman on October 8, 2010 at 2:05pm

Boothy,
Thanks for the info.

Al,
You know best. What you have said makes sense. So to go along with instancing, or the lack of, what about network farming. I have read in the overall manual of IRender nXt that once Batch Renderer is up and running without any cliches, they would be heading in the direction of farming. What is the timing on something like that? That would make a lot more sense in speeding up the rendering process due to the large amount of processing power you can get from a farmed network.

Thank you both for the responses.
I have to admit this forum is pretty awesome.

Thanks again!

Nick