This is my current WIP for my portfolio. Currently sitting at 1.7m verts, but this will be lower once i reduce the bevel resolution of the curves (they’re at 3 atm). I’m not really sure how low I need to get the vert count before exporting into Octane though, but I’m well over my GPU’s limit (gts450). The obj. file is 12.2mb and crashes Octane as soon as I open the file. Anybody have any idea what file size I should be shooting for? (or possibly a vert count?)
Best Regards,
Ben
WHOA! 
that is amazing!
indeed. wow 
tough predicament concerning the vert count… you might end up having several different versions of the file depending on the shot/render.
for distance shots, where geometry will be far smaller than the pixels that eventually represent it, you might consider ditching parts of geometry in favour of faces with textures/transparency applied, so it will still look convincing from a distance.
for closeups, perhaps remove some of the geometry that isn’t going to effect the light in a big way…so you keep the really important geometry but make the overal mesh ‘lighter’.
Very nice mate!
Incredible amount of trusses, and detail, i bet u used arrays heavily.
As for rendering, you can always get a better computer, or sent it to a renderfarm, or do what zeffii suggested.
Decreace the bevel as well, especially for distance shots, where it is just useless.
Wow! that is a serious piece of work that you have there. I think it’s incredible how you have created every metal beam to almost exactly like the real thing. Great job!
About Octane Render:
I use Octane render for my scenes aswell and don’t seem to ever have a problem importing a mesh that is 40+mb in size.
I think that the size of the file doesnt matter but it’s the vert count that does. 1.7m is alot! you might want to aim for 600-800k if you can 1m if you really cant go below. are you using subsurf? also could you post a wireframe because it is a little difficult to help without one.
I use a 1GB GTX460 Gddr5 oced to 850mhz on the core and have never had a scene crash with it, pretty awsome.
What cuda version are you using? try updating to the newest 3.2 Cuda, has a few fixes and tweaks.
Well…I just spent the past hour removing verts and was fairly successful I found a bunch of excess verts in the connection plates (about 200k of em…ouch) and dropped the resolution of the tubes down so they each consist of only 8 verts, so now I’m down to about 851k total I can successfully import it into Octane now, but I still have a lot of modeling to do.
@ zeffii: I did consider using planes with alpha maps for the beams, but due to the fact that I want to render it 34"x48" @300dpi, I will need that extra bit of realism that 3D beams offer.
Thanks for the comments, and I will post an update once I have the upper beams in place.
Best Regards,
Ben
good! it will look better anyway 
A little update:
I’ve gotten most of the beams finished, so I will be starting on the details next.
This is a piece for my portfolio, but I will be printing it fairly large for a poster and I’m still debating about how I want to go about creating the environment.
@DDD: Yes this does use a ton of modifiers 
I might post a rendering with the modifiers turned off so you can check it out, lol.
Best Regards,
Ben
