Way to improve the realtime-rendering performance of blender?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Well, hi there.
I am often forced to use very high poly objects in blender (around 1.000.000 polys)
if this happens, the performance is really bad. Someone told me, that this is just because the OpenGL-API for windows sucks with blender.
So 2 questions:
a) Is blender faster with linux?
b) Is there any way to improve the performance with software on windows?
Thx

2

b) Is there any way to improve the performance with software on windows?

Yes indeed there is, but it dose not use the blender game engine.
here is the installer instructions so you can use crystalspace with blender just like the BGE only it launches a separate application rather than rendering from inside blender.
http://b2cs.delcorp.org/index.php/ArtistInstall

1,000,000 poly is pretty high for any real time rendering engine.

IF you have any questions please ask here: (dont ask in the game forums here or you might get in trouble)

3

Blender might be doing this soon but fundamentally this is problem with blenders current OpenGL implementation.

glBegin()
…
glEnd()

vs.

glDrawElements()
or
glDrawArrays()

Reason being with Draw Elements you can render an object with a million polygons in about 3 OpenGL calls. This puts your realtime rendering limits to about what your hardware can handle - Its even faster if you cache the vertex arrays and texture data on the video card.

With a begin/end pair - you need about 4 million OpenGL calls to render the same thing - so your taking a huge overhead hit to render a small number of polys.

So in a nutshell thats the problem. Source is open so anyone can change it but be warned its not easy task and would require a lot of time.

4

uhhh…looks pretty complex…but ill try. Thank you!

5

ok, from what i understand you need to model high-poly models and it gets slow, another reason for this might be memory, how much do you have, and how fast is the memory?

6

Realtime view in Blender is limited by OGL calls.

At some limit - it will simply choke.

IME, Blender under Linux (with the hardware I have tried) is a bit better about it.

The solution is re-architecting the OGL code - have fun, if you’d like to try.

Or, do what all 3d artists have to do, and work with an impostor of some sort - learn to use subsurfing and multires correctly, use bump/displacement maps for detail rather than polys, etc.

7

Ok, I installed it and its working, but what is it for? :eek:
My OpenGl is still slow :frowning:

8

crystal space is a separate game engine. Now that its installed, you must export the .blend world you created into a format that crystal space can read. It’s really not difficult if you find the right tutorials, which you should be able to find with a search of “blender export crystal space”

9

I think some people here want something different than game engines…

10

I think were talking about the blender user interface - not game engines… but I could be wrong.

11

Joe Eager already wrote a new vertex array drawing system for blender that is currently only being used in the bmesh branch during editmode, but is general enough to be used anywhere in blender.

And boy is it fasssssssst.

Cheers,

12

Briggs, good news.

Jeez, seems Blender is devloping at lightspeed now. I guess I need to brush up on C/C++ and learn python to help out. I actually wrote a 3D modeler for Amiga in 1991, for personal use. Life somehow led me astray with programming for last 10 years or so…

Blender with OS philosopy is making me want to contribute something…

Best to check out the sources for starters I guess.