Instancing + Graswald + Scatter + E-Cycles... In a post Octane LightWave world

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Before migrating to Blender (started about a year ago) I have done my outdoor scenes (commercial - many dozens of them - w/ millions of grass chunk instances and hundreds or even thousands of trees instances) with Octane for LightWave. One of LW’s few redeeming qualities was its instancing, and Octane of course is able to instance in-engine like a mofo… but since switching over (LW to Blender and Octane to E-Cycles) I have been working on a huge gig that is nothing but industrial animations (which was THE perfect scenario as I master Blender). So no instancing at all, and not a blade of grass or a single tree in many months…

After a discussion yesterday with a client I am gathering that I am going to have to dust off my trees and landscaping stuff and I guess convert them to PrBSDF, as I will surely be doing a bunch of outdoor environs soon-ish, and I refuse to start any new work in LightWave (only tweak old jobs)… I am looking forward to playing around with my Graswald (haven’t even fired it up yet) and I was planning on getting Scatter as soon as it is available, but I have no idea what to expect as far as performance, ability to instance stuff, and render times in E-Cycles with truly heavy scenes. I am coming from a situation (Octane LightWave) that is pretty damn good for doing that type of work…

btw, I have three 980Ti Hybrids, that I’ll be replacing with three RTX hybrids before long, 32GB RAM, an i7 5820k.

So I am looking for some peeps here to please edify me if I should be able to work in E-Cycles Blender using Graswald and Scatter (etc) at the same level that I am used to working in Octane LightWave, or is the instancing and rendering of thousands and thousands of things in Cycles/Blender not quite up to par with Octane? I do have an Octane Enterprise license and have the ability to use Octane Blender (with multi-GPUs - not the freebie ver), but honestly I want to avoid even touching that if I don’t have to… Please advise folks. I’d really love to have an idea of what to expect, and maybe I will buy my RTXs sooner if needed. But I was trying to hold off on that a little longer if I can… And I would do a bunch of testing but as I write this I currently have a nice fat stack of renders lined up in B-Renderon and my workstation will be rendering just about nonstop for the next day or two…

And perhaps this could become a thread about Instancing + Graswald + Scatter + E-Cycles and best practices and methods etc when combining these things… Jump in please!

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Hi,
Currently beta testing Scatter under E-cycles 2.81,

Here are some numbers for my test scene
Terrain 200 x 200m 996k verts 1’993’054 faces
16’472’788 (16.4 mio) grass clusters particles with texture based distribution (810 verts 531 face each)
GPU only - 1070 - full hd 12:35 min without any tweak.

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Okay, okay, now we are talking! That’s sounding great Stephen! Do you have any screenies you can share bro?

And speaking of bro… BRO! …You are the developer of Archipack, and you only have a measly 1070!!! And just one?!! What gives? :stuck_out_tongue:

I’d also really love to get anyone else up in here who has also switched and can compare apples to apples between Octane’s instancing and that of Cycles/Blender (preferably E-Cycles)…

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Hey, don’t know if you are aware of this but you might check this out. Scatter 🌱

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Hey, thanks a bunch for joining in, but Scatter is actually the third word in the title of this thread. I’m very much looking forward to using it. :wink:

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Have you test the three of them together?

Cuz am also planning on making large scale exterior archviz animation with this three.

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Not Graswald + Scatter yet, but Scatter + E-Cycles is the shizz. Get both Ravi. You will not be disappointed. I think the Graswald guys are working with Dorian (Scatter dev) to make them play real nice together… I’m off in three.js land for weeks to come on a big project, and haven’t been doing any archviz since I bought Scatter, but I did some quick tests and was blown away. You’ll find great info in both of those threads about E-C + Scatter. Good luck!

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With scatters proxy system and camera culling even with my 1060 laptop it is feasible to do some large grassy archviz scenarios :star_struck:

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