Instancing ? Hard code or Plugin idea ....

[Justanother1]

Many other CG programs are using Instancing now .... for building scenes with crowds, ant farms, whatever .. the idea is simple to create copies of an existing model, NOT DUPLICATES. The copies are all read from the same Ram as the original, As to save on RAM and File-size. In Daz Studio, if you run an Instance of your model, then repose the original model, the instance will be reposed as well ... but I'm guessing it's parented to a Null ... as it can be Moved and Rotated! ..
While playing around a bit with Marks 64-bit Masterpiece!!, I realized this is something that should be implemented here!! If you start with a cube, duplicate x, Select all duplicate y, Select all duplicate z, .... Select all and do this all again .. over and over, eventually get to your million polygons ... but around 100 K mine started bogging down, then I realized it was because the objects list was getting so long, so I used the Combine feature, sure enough that brought it up to speed!! .... so I continued on .... and it slowed down around the 700K mark but it kept going .. I finally got bored around the 2 mil mark. But understand, while they were combined, each was still it's own geometry. If each had been a single vertex, that was just represented by the in-ram geometry of the first, I could have gone to 100mil or maybe more .... is anything like this possible ???

[ggaliens]

Come to the ManifoldLab section ... you know it's in there already.

[Justanother1]

is it ??

[Justanother1]

It is ... but it's buggy and doesn't really do what it needs to .... yeah with cubes and stuff. But I tried a 100K Quad model ... duplicated and went for it .... was still waiting 1/2 hour later when I gave up ??

[ggaliens]

Hmmm. Bugs can be fixed.

I have used it to export 10-20 Million polys from Wings3D.

[Wegg]

The whole idea of instancing in my opinion is to avoid bulky models. If you have a tree, you will want to instance a variety of leaves on that tree at render time and not have your 3D model be a huge point cloud. This is my subtle way of saying . . . if you are trying to instance 100k models. . . you might need to tweak your pipeline.

[ggaliens]

Meh ... I'm not sure I agree wholehartedly Wegg.

Would depend a lot on the objective I would say.

A counter argument might be that something as small as leaves should be done
as procedure displacement or texture or some non instancing tricks.

I don't have much experience with other apps and instancing ... I can only imagine what I want for my scene with my minds eye.

Sweat spot might be having a crowd of people in distance at 10 characters and 15,000 polys texture per character and then instance a bunch of those around and about.

Instancing does not work thart well for me with my current approach because it still requires a degenrate WEDS object and that means many WEDS object in scene ... which in itself can be a problem. Maybe some day ... someone will do it better in Wings3D.

[Wegg]

Leaves, Grass, Weeds, Rubble, Sand, Thorns, Bricks, Shingles etc. All perfect for instancing. Where I'd love instancing in Wings. . . are things like. . . Rivets on the side of an airplane where I want "this" thing to be placed in the center of "These" polygons. Which I think you can do now so. . . I'm good. :-)

[dgud]

Real instancing requires work :-)

I.e redoing everything from the basics type of thing,
but if we should continue improving things that is one of the things that should be done.

[ggaliens]

Instancing required BEER and pull-tabs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq-eSLnWl...e=youtu.be