@DarkChibiman (DarkChibiman) posted a new topic, subject "Help me make a MASSIVE Render please!". It read:

   Hello.  
    My Issue is currently that I want to make an incredibly large and complex scene, complete with (biggest problem too) full thick grass on a field and part of a mountain side along a river. As you can imagine, the use of grass as particles will cause my face count to skyrocket (its not very thick yet and my face count is already almost 8,000,000). Time is not the issue, but when I get the children count too high my computer crashes. What Render options do you think I could use to allow me to make a massive amount of faces and Render high-quality without crashing?
    
    If you would like more information, or even a window picture of my scene, just tell me and i'll give you any info you want if you can help me. I didn't say that much because I don't know what info would help you.
    
    Thank you for your information and time!!!  
    \----Jeremy

To which @yellow (yellow) replied

    Why have you got an incredibly large scene, manage it better to go smoothly with the tools/hardware you have available. 
    
    A few ideas / comments.
    
    Render layers / passes?
    
    Break project into smaller scenes / files. Render the grass in it's own file if it's so big. Composite after.
    
    If you're not planning on compositing then plan to. You won't get an awesome render just hitting the render button and will need to comp after especially if you are going to all this trouble with the detail in your scene.
    
    Matte paint the mountains / grass for example, why do it all textured geometry? I don't get the point in modelling everything in the scene to the nth detail it ain't clever.
    
    It's not efficient or practical as scene sizes and complexity go up to model everything in detail, learn to ‘cheat', finish the project in good time without getting it hung round your neck, crash your machine repeatedly and then blame it on the tools or software. 
    
    When you do your first animation will you succeed handling it the same way?
    
    Good luck.

Then @DarkChibiman (DarkChibiman) said

    Okay now, despite the little-more-than-neccessary negativity, thank you for the post. But what exactly is compositing when it comes to Rendering a scene (I understand nodes well enough). And theres nothing incredible or gigantic about my scene right now! The grass is only localized to areas where the camera will be close up to the ground at some point, and will definately be neccessary when the character steps on it… and how will matte painting help make realistic looking grass for the non-close up areas for that example? I can't get the grass thick before it crashes, how do I get the grass to be thicker with less memory usage other than add particles or children (if there is a way)? Does anyone have any other help or suggestions?
    
    Thank you!  
    \-----Jeremy

@JoeHardy15 (JoeHardy15) replied

    Well, I had (have) a similar problem. My scene isn't that big, but I can't seem to get enough grass in it either. lol. The most I can go is like 100,000 on the particale system thingy (noob). I asked the same question about another way to do nice grass, but I guess nobody knows. And as far as making the distant grass look great without particles or children, that is kinda like sweeping dirt under a rug, but that is just me. lol. I'll play with it some more, but I think you and I just need to amp our RAM. lol.
    
    Sorry I couldn't help out.

@yellow (yellow) replied

    DarkChibiman:
    
    > Okay now, despite the little-more-than-neccessary negativity, thank you for the post. But what exactly is compositing when it comes to Rendering a scene (I understand nodes well enough). And theres nothing incredible or gigantic about my scene right now! The grass is only localized to areas where the camera will be close up to the ground at some point, and will definately be neccessary when the character steps on it… and how will matte painting help make realistic looking grass for the non-close up areas for that example? I can't get the grass thick before it crashes, how do I get the grass to be thicker with less memory usage other than add particles or children (if there is a way)? Does anyone have any other help or suggestions?
    > 
    > Thank you!  
    >  \-----Jeremy
    
    Compositing - Search and you will find. What does it have to do with rendering. :spin:
    
    Not a big scene now but you're planning on making one, but your machine crashes already. Suggested alternative approaches but you want to use particles?
    
    Matte painting - Search and you will find. Extreme example go to www.fxguide.com and look at the mattes created for the latest Batman movie. You seem to think matte painting is some sort of inferior unrealistic process.
    
    Grass, images on planes mixed with localised use of particles. Search BA and you'll find a lot of examples.
    
    So following your unnecessarily negative reply to perfectly good suggestions good luck.

To which @DarkChibiman (DarkChibiman) replied

    Hmmm, interesting quotes. So, here's what I believe could be a probable solution:
    
    Compositing----Create the scene I want to but only with a small patch of grass to which will interact with the character and other objects, and then an outline of extra grass to buffer the border for when I composite. Create a copy .blend file, but this one will only animate the extra grass and everything else will be Black, save as a file that supports RGBA.
    
    …But I don't have an software that could overlay the two movie files.
    
    I can deal with the other large objects in the scene. It's easy, because during the Render I can just send the onject to a different layer when it, it's shadow, or it's reflection won't be in the shot, thus Blender won't have to calculate it within the scene.
    
    Matte Painting----A good compositing option, but grass has I nice movement in wind that I think in animation gives the scene a realistic feel. Matte painting would more-or-less give me pretty stagnant grass. If I can find out how to overlay two movie files, I think Ill stick with making the two .blend scenes.
    
    Also, I had another idea, but I don't know…is there a way to set up an IPO for an objects weight paint? That could be useful for setting up the thick grass in only the areas where I need it, and won't make Blender calculate unseen grass.
    
    Thanks for the helpful comments!!!  
    \-----Jeremy

So @tak (tak) replied

    If your computer is the issue you can play with the strand rendering options for your hair particle system to get it to render. There are a few options that make rendering large scale hair particle systems easier on your computer (thanks to Big Buck Bunny). You can read about it at the below links.
    
    http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/hair-and-fur/  
    http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/particles/
    
    DarkChibiman:
    
    > Hmmm, interesting quotes. So, here's what I believe could be a probable solution:
    > 
    > Compositing----Create the scene I want to but only with a small patch of grass to which will interact with the character and other objects, and then an outline of extra grass to buffer the border for when I composite. Create a copy .blend file, but this one will only animate the extra grass and everything else will be Black, save as a file that supports RGBA.
    > 
    > …But I don't have an software that could overlay the two movie files.
    > 
    > I can deal with the other large objects in the scene. It's easy, because during the Render I can just send the onject to a different layer when it, it's shadow, or it's reflection won't be in the shot, thus Blender won't have to calculate it within the scene.
    
    Blender's compositor and sequences both allow you to easily combine videos together, amongst a ton of other things. I would suggest going through the following links if you're thinking about breaking up your scene, which is probably a good idea if you have a lot of static objects that don't change during the animation.
    
    http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Compositing  
    http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Video_Sequence_Editing

After which, @3pointEdit (3pointEdit) added

    Compositing a patch of grass as tiles across a field sounds plausible (as a texture), however I would suggest varying the loop time of the animated patch. Otherwise it would seems as tho' the breeze across the field is the same everywhere. That would be background grass.
    
    The edge of the tile grass and particle grass would be the hardest part to mask, I suggest using meshs or shadows to hide the join.
    
    Oh yeah, do use a mottled texture for the dirt to hide the boring uniformity below the grass.

To which @DarkChibiman (DarkChibiman) replied

    Thank you all! You guys have been very helpful with my animation and I will do probably all of your suggestions.
    
    I really appreciate all the help, Ill post the animation when it is done
    
    \----Jeremy
    
    (PS Strand Rendering…I was always wondering how BBB did it, with that much grass I thought they must have had 1000GB of RAM)


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