Instancing

[noelyone]

Hi Guys,
I upgraded from Indigo 2.4 to 3.2 yesterday and have tried rendering some of my models (that contain instancing) and for some reason they do not render with skindigo. Everything just crashed. There are lots of trees and grass in the scenes. I have tried looking for answers on the forum through previous posts and someone recommended exploding each original tree (there are four types of tree with over 100 dummies) but stil this hasn't worked. Any way around this?
Thanks
Noel

[lycium]

Hi Noel, which exporter are you using? Would it be possible for you to email us the scene (to support@indigorenderer.com)?

Thanks,

Thomas

[Whaat]

Hi,

Instancing is handled a lot differently in SkIndigo 3.2. However, it shouldn't cause crashing. Instancing is done automatically now. In some cases, you may get faster export times if you explode your deeply nested components. For example, if you have a tree component, and it contains branch components->sub branch components->leaf components, you might get better export performance if you explode your leaf components and/or sub branch components.

In general, since there was such a big change between SkIndigo 2 and 3, it may not always work as expected to re-render old scenes with version 3.

If there is a way for you to share your SKP file (eg. dropbox) I would like to a look at it to see what is causing the issues you are having.

Thanks!

[lycium]

I've forwarded you the scene, thanks for looking into it

[noelyone]

Thanks for looking into this Whaat. When you say that instancing is done automatically, are you saying that there is no option for instancing in skindigo and that if you have 100 trees (that are the same) in the scene, that skindigo will automatically use instancing and therefore the scene will start rendering in a matter of seconds? I say this because the other day I duplicated a high polygon bush with flowers about 10 times and indigo took forever to start rendering.... It didn't appear that instancing was automatic on duplicate objects...

[Pibuz]

..well, instancing IS automated, indeed, but there is one case in which the export process still takes a lot of time, even if it's actually enabled and you will benefit of lower memory usage.
It's the case when you have an instanced object with a large number of sub-instanced geometry, say a tree made up of several grouped sub-branches, made up of several grouped sub-leaves.

The instanced sub-objects are actually exported correctly, but skindigo spends a lot of time scanning the tree of the geometry (excuse the pun..)