Polygon Count

[Chris]

Hi all,

Anyone had a lot of experience loading polygon heavy models into ventuz?
Can anyone give an idea of where the limits are as far as polygon count??

Any info is good info

Cheers

Chris

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

We are constantly dealing with polygon heavy models. With full HD output and decent AntiAliasing you can easily push a few million polygons on a current hardware system. We do quite a bit of multi-pass rendering for special effects and such so the geometry loaded will actually be rendered several time. So you have to factor that in in your calculations if you want to do glow, depth of field or things like that. In the end the amount you can push depends (as always) on your CPU and GPU. I am using a QuadCore System with a Geforce 680 and the amount of polygons i can use is quite staggering.

[Chris]

Hi Christian,
Excellent! Thanks for the detailed reply!
I've got into the 10's of thousands so far, but i have some projects coming up that will require a lot more, so that's good to know!

cheers
Chris

[alfred]

Dear Christian,
There is a auto brand who wants to build a showroom. They have 5 different series of car, from economic to luxury and SUV. All of the 5 models need to be shown in the interactive multimedia, from changing color, exteior and interior viewing , changing wheels, opeining doors,etc. So there have to be some polygon heavy models. In my experience, too heavy polygon model will lead to Ventuz unstable. So I am afraid of Ventuz will be overloaded with different 5 series of cars. In this case, what hardware do you recommend and what other suggestion do you give me?

Thanks in advance!
alfred

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

I never encountered Ventuz being unstable when dealing with heavy polygon count models. The frame rate just dropped and dropped and dropped ...

I created a touchscreen application for a car manufacturer about a year ago and there 15 car models at the same time - including reflections.

Here is a screenshot:

Audi Motor Show Touchscreen Application Snapshot

Since the cars were never visible on the entire screen and since the screen was only 42" the resolution/quality of the models did not have to be too high. I think they were somewhere around 150K-200K polygons per model. So the most important question you have to ask is: How big will the models be displayed and how big is the screen you are displaying them on? Let's assume the worst possible situation. Fullscreen on a gigantic screen. The most important factor then would be RAM. Main Memory needs to be very high and especially your GPU memory needs to be high so you do not have to load the models and everything can be stored in memory. At least that is my experience.

I would maybe create two version of the models. One lower-poly version with reduced details for the menu selection and the high-poly version for the configurator/showroom parts. You only show one high-poly model at a time so you won't have any problems.

Very important: Avoid SLI or Crossfire. Do not use Graphics cards with Dual GPUs on one board. You might think that the large amount of RAM those cards have is great but in fact each GPU core takes only half and Ventuz3 does not work well with SLI/Crossfire. So no AMD Radeon HD 7990 or GeForce 690 cards. Those are a no go. Since I am a true supporter for nVidia because their cards are reliable, stable and exceptionally fast I would recommend a GeForce Titan. If you have to output across seveveral screens you should go with Quadro K5000. The Quadro card is less powerful than the Titan but allows for easy multi-monitor setups. Especially with Ventuz4 that will be a very potent combination from what I hear.

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

Oh I forgot one more thing which you should bear in mind. A high polygon count does not necessarily mean that your model will look good. You should definitely invest more time in shading and effects such as proper env maps and maybe even depth of field, flares, grain, etc to get a professional post-production level look and feel and not the usual realtime graphics look.

Here is an example of what I mean. This is all rendered in Ventuz. The models are not as important as the shading, ambient occlusion, flares and post effects.

[gabrielefx]

impressive graphics!

you used ambient occlusion and flares Glare plugins?

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

Thanks. Yes, I added Ambient Occlusion maps to the helmets. The flares are Lens Flares from Glare Technologies. But you could do that with a bit of Alpha Blending as well without the plugin. The Lens Flare plugin is really helpful if you have to auto-fade behind geometry and if you want halos, glares on the "lens" , etc. I used it to save time.

[alfred]

Hi Christian,
Your advice is really very valueable, thanks very very very much

alfred

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

You're most welcome. Good luck with your project.