The 100 million polygon model

[The Yosemite Bear]

The green coloration in the first shots make it look like the Divine Cannabis Dragon

me too

I was thinking that they had snuck into the brotherhood labs and found our Cannabis tenetcle monster dragon.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Now, if that sucker was animated, it'd grab any commercial machine by the tender bits and just stomp the unholy crap out of it.

I'm of the opinion that that thing would be simply impossible to animate, at least in any form other than "action figure mode." There's simply just way too much shit all over it.

All it's pretty much good for is just standing there.

[Redleader34]

10^9 million polygons... can we compare that to any video game?

[salm]

Eh, you don't need a fast computer.
Just wait a long time.

And lots of RAM.

Not really. 100 million polygons isn't that much, rendering-wise. Especially if he doesn't apply any extra effects to it.

100 million polys is a lot. The´s using GI so the amount of polys does affect the render time notably.
As we can see in the first couple pics he used very view Rays per sample. That indicates that it took a shitload of time to render.

What i´m wondering though is what kind of a machine he´s running, not because of the rendering time but because of the handlability in the viewports. I mean here at work i´m working on a 1.2 Million Poly model and it´s not really that much fun. The viewports are slow. I´ve got one of those geforce quadro cards, which are quite good.
Also he´s using Max which doesn´t like high polycounts at all.

[salm]

10^9 million polygons... can we compare that to any video game?

IIRC cars in modern racing games have about 60 000 Polys.

[Dooey Jo]

10^9 million polygons... can we compare that to any video game?

I don't know the exact polygon counts for any games (I think there are some that have diagnostic tools and such though so you could probably find out pretty easily), but the Xbox360 can supposedly pump out 500 million triangles per second (though, that model seems to be using quads, which is a little different. They're also lighted which I don't know if the Xbox' theoretical number is).

But if we assume that a car in a racing game (as per Salm's example) have 60 000 triangles, and there are 4 cars on screen all the time, that's 240 000 triangles (that's also not counting the terrain). The game renders that 60 times per second at least, so in a second you get 14.4 million rendered triangles. So after ten seconds of play, you have over a hundred million triangles rendered. Note that a 3D rendering program such as 3DS Max doesn't work exactly like a game's rendering engine, but we can use it as an example to put things into perspective...

Not really. 100 million polygons isn't that much, rendering-wise. Especially if he doesn't apply any extra effects to it.

Wait what? Are you kidding me? What Render Farm do you own and how much did you pay for it?

We are not exactly talking real-time rendering here. My computer is fairly crappy but it wouldn't take all that long for it to crank out 100 million polygons (I haven't tested, but surely no more than an hour). What it would take is a lot of RAM (which I why I haven't tested it) but I think he should be fine with a GB or so. Don't get me wrong, he's probably using a good system, but it need not be some kind of super computer.

100 million polys is a lot. The´s using GI so the amount of polys does affect the render time notably.
As we can see in the first couple pics he used very view Rays per sample. That indicates that it took a shitload of time to render.

Yes, those first pictures undoutably took quite some time. It says he used Photoshop to retouch it a bit too but he doesn't say how or why...

What i´m wondering though is what kind of a machine he´s running, not because of the rendering time but because of the handlability in the viewports. I mean here at work i´m working on a 1.2 Million Poly model and it´s not really that much fun. The viewports are slow. I´ve got one of those geforce quadro cards, which are quite good.
Also he´s using Max which doesn´t like high polycounts at all.

Well from the looks of it he modeled each part separately, and probably put it together only for the pics and rendering. It also says he used MeshSmooth twice, which would increase the polygon count by quite a lot.
Makes sense, too, to do it that way. Otherwise he'd probably have something like 0.1 fps in the end on his view port which isn't fun at all. Maya's fluid dynamics simulator did that to my computer once when I tortured it...

[salm]

I just tried to create 25 Million Polygons and the system hanged quite instantly. It has two gigs of ram, so this guy must have quite a lot.

He probably rendered the whole works in several stages? First the Face, then some tentacles, then some other tentacles and so on and then put it together in PS.

[Azrael]

But if we assume that a car in a racing game (as per Salm's example) have 60 000 triangles, and there are 4 cars on screen all the time, that's 240 000 triangles (that's also not counting the terrain). The game renders that 60 times per second at least, so in a second you get 14.4 million rendered triangles. So after ten seconds of play, you have over a hundred million triangles rendered. Note that a 3D rendering program such as 3DS Max doesn't work exactly like a game's rendering engine, but we can use it as an example to put things into perspective...

Ahh, but you are forgetting that modern GPUs contain a myriad of technologies designed to avoid the rendering of unseen geometry. Come to think of that, sofware rendering technology has all that and more, so while the model may consist of 10^9 million polygons a good portion of that will not be rendered due to backface culling. Also, it should be noted that GPUs performance today totally outclasses CPUs by a long shot when it's just raw triangles. Considering that this monster was most likely rendered purely in software, I don't think a game is a fair comparison.

You can see in the wireframe screenshots he was clearly using *SDS on the model. Tessellation time for an *SDS model isn't significant for a few hundred thousand polys but just a few million has a noticeable increase in rendering time, so I willing to bet that a good portion of the time taken for the rendered shots went into tessellating that model. That plus he does appear to be using radiosity here - two gigantic wastes of time a game engine wouldn't have to worry about.

*For those who aren't familiar, SDS=Sub division surfaces

[Dooey Jo]

I just tried to create 25 Million Polygons and the system hanged quite instantly. It has two gigs of ram, so this guy must have quite a lot.

That seems strange. 2 GB should be enough for 25M polys. Unless of course the modeler stores much more information about them than just their vertices and maybe normals, which I suppose is quite possible... Maybe there's some kind of high-poly mode.

He probably rendered the whole works in several stages? First the Face, then some tentacles, then some other tentacles and so on and then put it together in PS.

I don't know if it's possible in 3DS but in Maya you can render a scene in several layers and passes, to increase rendering time and manageability of complex scenes. He could have rendered each part as a layer in that case.

[Dooey Jo]

Ahh, but you are forgetting that modern GPUs contain a myriad of technologies designed to avoid the rendering of unseen geometry. Come to think of that, sofware rendering technology has all that and more, so while the model may consist of 10^9 million polygons a good portion of that will not be rendered due to backface culling. Also, it should be noted that GPUs performance today totally outclasses CPUs by a long shot when it's just raw triangles. Considering that this monster was most likely rendered purely in software, I don't think a game is a fair comparison.

It wasn't so much a comparison as an example of how much 100 million polys are in game terms. Not only are CPUs generally slower than GPU at processing polygons, the rendering algorithms used are generally also quite different. You can compare it to the view port rendering though, which most likely is done in hardware.

You can see in the wireframe screenshots he was clearly using *SDS on the model. Tessellation time for an *SDS model isn't significant for a few hundred thousand polys but just a few million has a noticeable increase in rendering time, so I willing to bet that a good portion of the time taken for the rendered shots went into tessellating that model. That plus he does appear to be using radiosity here - two gigantic wastes of time a game engine wouldn't have to worry about.

Of course, but rendering a subdiv mesh of n faces is obviously not the same thing as rendering n polygons. And specifying polygon count on a model that has such a mesh seems very misleading. Or wait, is this "MeshSmooth" thing that he talked about actually just 3DS' name for subdivs?

[Darth Wong]

All those polygons, and it still doesn't look like anything more than yet another slithery thing. Ooh, but this slithery thing has a shitload of scales and ribs on it!

When I saw the thread title, I was thinking it would be something really cool, like an incredibly detailed aircraft carrier. Instead, it's just a really bumpy anime monster.

[Azrael]

Or wait, is this "MeshSmooth" thing that he talked about actually just 3DS' name for subdivs?

I believe Mesh smooth is SDS. The Max 8 pdf on their website vagely aludes to it (115 pages. 56k Beware). I've used max before but never got far enough into it to know for myself.

Of course, but rendering a subdiv mesh of n faces is obviously not the same thing as rendering n polygons

What? I though that no matter what alternative modeling method you used (MeshSmooth, MetaNURBS, HyperNURBS Plain Old NURBS, Splines) the renderer 'speaks' vertecies and polygons. That meant tessellation whitch meant, in the end, triangles anyway.

Out of curiosity Dooey Jo, what 3d programs do you use/have used? I've extensively used Lightwave and have encountered 3ds Max, Maya and Softimage

All those polygons, and it still doesn't look like anything more than yet another slithery thing. Ooh, but this slithery thing has a shitload of scales and ribs on it!

I though it was technically impressive from an amateur 3d modeler standpoint. I don't think I've considered the asthetics until now....

[lPeregrine]

But if we assume that a car in a racing game (as per Salm's example) have 60 000 triangles, and there are 4 cars on screen all the time, that's 240 000 triangles (that's also not counting the terrain). The game renders that 60 times per second at least, so in a second you get 14.4 million rendered triangles. So after ten seconds of play, you have over a hundred million triangles rendered. Note that a 3D rendering program such as 3DS Max doesn't work exactly like a game's rendering engine, but we can use it as an example to put things into perspective...

But two problems with that analogy:

1) A HUGE part of the problem with working with insanely high-poly models is simply storing the model file. There's a huge difference between having to keep 240,000 polys in memory/viewport and 14.4 million polys in memory/viewport.

2) He's using radiosity, which models the interaction after the first bounce. In the 240k example, that means much easier calculations for the secondary bounces compared to trying to work with the "equivalent" 14.4 million polys.

============================

I believe Mesh smooth is SDS. The Max 8 pdf on their website vagely aludes to it (115 pages. 56k Beware). I've used max before but never got far enough into it to know for myself.

Pretty much.

What? I though that no matter what alternative modeling method you used (MeshSmooth, MetaNURBS, HyperNURBS Plain Old NURBS, Splines) the renderer 'speaks' vertecies and polygons. That meant tessellation whitch meant, in the end, triangles anyway.

Mostly... there are some renderers that can work with true NURBS surfaces without tesselation. But yes, most of the time, the only difference is those alternate methods let you scale tesselation detail as-needed rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of poly models.

[Dooey Jo]

I did a small test in Maya with 5 nice little toruses of 2 million triangles each. It took about seven minutes to batch render it so I've changed my mind, and it would probably actually take around an hour to render a 100 million model. Mind you, my system was mediocre back in 2001, with a 1.4 GHz P4, 256 MB RAM and a Geforce 2. And I see now I also didn't shut down freaking Norton and Quicktime and a lot of other programs, which would probably have helped somewhat...

What? I though that no matter what alternative modeling method you used (MeshSmooth, MetaNURBS, HyperNURBS Plain Old NURBS, Splines) the renderer 'speaks' vertecies and polygons. That meant tessellation whitch meant, in the end, triangles anyway.

Yes most likely, but you wouldn't specify a polygon count on a NURBS model, would you? Because that's totally dependent on your current rendering needs and has not much at all to do with the modelling itself. In Maya at least, it's kind of the same thing for subdiv surfaces; the actual polygon count can vary a lot without changing the actual model much. There's at least three different poly counts you can specify with them; the primitive geometry used for basic polygonal modelling, the view port approximation, and the final rendered version. All of which can be pretty drastically different...

Out of curiosity Dooey Jo, what 3d programs do you use/have used? I've extensively used Lightwave and have encountered 3ds Max, Maya and Softimage

I use Maya 6 occasionally. Nowadays mostly when there's an assignment for the university, because it's the program they use for all their modelling and rendering needs (it's a game development education programme BTW).

[Azrael]

I did a small test in Maya with 5 nice little toruses of 2 million triangles each. It took about seven minutes to batch render it so I've changed my mind, and it would probably actually take around an hour to render a 100 million model. Mind you, my system was mediocre back in 2001, with a 1.4 GHz P4, 256 MB RAM and a Geforce 2.

It could have been worse. You could have been trying to make that same model on a Duron 700 with 128MB or RAM in windows 98 with intergrated chipset video I thought those hellish memories would never resurface. Oh the horror....

Yes most likely, but you wouldn't specify a polygon count on a NURBS model, would you? Because that's totally dependent on your current rendering needs and has not much at all to do with the modelling itself.

Sure you would. When your trying to pimp your badass modeling skill across the internet saying "this thousand tentacle monster has over 100 million polygons" is alot more impressive than saying "this model was made with over 100,000 n-patches"

other than that, no I cannot think of a reason.

I use Maya 6 occasionally. Nowadays mostly when there's an assignment for the university, because it's the program they use for all their modelling and rendering needs (it's a game development education programme BTW).

Maya is awesome incarnate, only surpased by Maya unlimited and maybe rival by softimage. If it weren't for the sacrifice-five-virgins-to-kali price, Maya Unlimited would be mine. Lightwave's a lesser program, but not bad by any stretch and the price is unbelievable considering what their selling. Its a real bargin.

[Dooey Jo]

Sure you would. When your trying to pimp your badass modeling skill across the internet saying "this thousand tentacle monster has over 100 million polygons" is alot more impressive than saying "this model was made with over 100,000 n-patches"

Heh. Well, the modelers at school (I'm not one of them though) seem to be all about pimpin' their badass normal mapping skills now anyway. In fact they do it so much and I'm so used to seeing it that I almost at first glance thought the monster was just another normalmapping job too...

Maya is awesome incarnate, only surpased by Maya unlimited and maybe rival by softimage. If it weren't for the sacrifice-five-virgins-to-kali price, Maya Unlimited would be mine. Lightwave's a lesser program, but not bad by any stretch and the price is unbelievable considering what their selling. Its a real bargin.

They have some kind of student licenses for Maya 6 Compelete at school I think, so officially that is what I use. If you saw me make some kind of reference to Maya's fluid dynamics simulator before, you must purge it from your mind

I haven't used it myself, but Lightwave seems to be a very fine program. I think they used it for Star Wars to some extent, along with Maya (I once found some kind of "Jar-Jar value" or something which you could specify for animation cycles. It really was called something "Jar-Jar").

[fusion]

My first impression was that he used a mac G5 with 8-16 Gb of memory, remember pixar likes macs, and to me macs like this stuff better than windows.
-or-
He had a 64 bit windows with 4Gb of memory and took tons of time to do it.

However I am with Darth Wong on this, I thought it would be something where the 100 million polygons can be used.

[CaptainChewbacca]

On behalf of people with crappy internet everywhere, I thank you for not inlining the pic.