Quickie experiment here, checking light & shadow, and how to get the shiny/icy effect.
vimeo.com/91013576
And a question - I’ve noticed that the frame times can suddenly spiral out of control. I hit 6m particles, and the render times are great, less than 1min. Then as we drift past 8million, we jump to 2, 5, 10, 20 mins per frame. Is that RAM running out? It’s a puny test machine, a MacBookPro 8Gb RAM - the machine becomes unresponsive, fans drop, everything crawls.
As long as I keep an eye on count then everything is fine though, will keep testing.
I experienced ridiculous preparing times when rendering X-Particles sequences, increasing almost potentially while crawling up the timeline… this occured despite caching to the XParticles native format or on the fly, YET saving to PRT via Krakatoa fixed the “issue” and kept rendering and preparing times stable and reasonable…
Try to compare and avoid caching to X-Particles caches at all times. Just load the saved prt sequence and disable all X-Particles related objects to be safe.
Second thought on your precise cause might be some wall you are hitting between 6 and 8 million particles memory-wise, although I would doubt that considering 8 GB ram, which should handle around 200 million particles smoothly whatsoever…
looking forward to your experience.
Hi Tyler - thanks for the pointer, saving out the PRT sequence did indeed help the issue. It still peaks at 3mins/frame for the initial export, but once that was done the PRT loader is great, scrubbing/previewing 8m cached particles (via the percentage display) is really powerful.
Rendering is back in the sub-30s range, motion blur on, silky smooth. Points to it being an X-particles issue, but we have a solution so it’s all good.
You are welcome,
I rarely use X-Particles, due to the lack in performance, but when I do, its only fun in connection with Krakatoa;)
I’ve updated the file on Vimeo, looks much cleaner.
vimeo.com/91013576
I didn’t realise the importance of shadow map size, that it was used whatever the shadow type. So that’s upped to 2000x2000, which gives the shadow a nice hard edge over the door. Secondly I’ve let Krakatoa do motion blur rather than a post effect, didn’t realise how quick it was. Nice.
Looks nice. Thanks for sharing!