I am still butting heads with the issue of having to many polygons… as soon as I start to create a scene with a gazilling parts … I’m forced to drop it because there are to many polygons in the scene and no way to put it all together…
So I re-read the entire manual tonite hoping for a hint… nothing. (although I did get some good info on other things that I needed to know ) 8)
The biggest thing though is how to get a gazillion poly’s into a single frame… there must be a way, I just can’t find any info on it.
You spread them out over layers (there are 20 layers) or use multiple scenes so you can still see the individual trees. If that’s not enough use different .blends and later you can append, or link between .blends or you can render scenes and composit them later (you don’t have to have everything in the scene when you render).
I don’t think that I explained my situation well enough. I have, for instance a robot that I was working on. The .blend file is a little over 2M. That render uses all of the memory and swap in my system, about 5G. The problem is that in order to finnish this model I would need more memory than my computer can feasibly handle.
I am wondering if there is a way to composite a single model in different renders, without having shadow problems or artifacts…
I have seen people render different resolutions and shading, lighting, and textures. But my texture and lighting is pretty basic. It’s the actual mesh components that have actually become to much. The decimator can’t decimate the meshes without ruining them. It’s just so many little parts and peices, but I have seen some really complexe scenes so I figure there has to be a way to do it.
My answer is basically the same; you’re going to have to render the main character/model alone with Premul or Key (F10 Render tab) and a format that supports Alpha layers with RGBA. Then you render the other layers; background, sky wahtever and use the Sequence Editor (or an outside program) to composit them together.
Unfortunately 2 of my bookmarks were from NicoDigital.com which is no more. One of them showed how to set up geometry for shadows etc like the following link (which is not for Blender but the principles remain the same):
I do see what you’re saying now. Thanks. I guess I was skipping through all of the animation stuff because I have just started with animation, and I wasn’t thinking about how it could be used for non animation as well as animation.
Man what a lot of extra work though. I suppose I will not get any faster at it until I get to work.