Hello,
I am a pretty new Visualize user and I am looking for some good tips to help handle the largest scene I will probably ever need to render.
I have a fairly complex chassis enclosure which has been modeled with great details (several electronics board, cooling fans, hardware, etc.) My workstation had no problem with it - exploded view animation - hence the high number of internal parts. I was able to even import a full 48U rack filled with this chassis, without lightening the assembly even though it was only for a few external renders.
The final step however is to model a lot of these racks on a data-center floor. I quickly maxed out nearly 400GB of ram in the process and killed it after it started swapping. I knew it wouldn't have been optimized considering I didn't need any of the internal parts of the chassis. So I made a simplified assembly removed as much as I possibly could, however I am still hitting a wall. I didn't stare at the screen for the 5-6 hours I let it try to import the assembly, I was not swapping (75% memory used).
At this point there is no a whole lot of parts I can strip off the assembly. So being pretty new to Visualize I wanted to ask if there were any trick to import large assemblies?
My assembly structure goes as Enclosure -> Linear Pattern (to fill a rack) -> Linear Pattern (for the first row of racks) -> Mirror for the second Row. I won't be modeling any additional row of racks, just these 2. I am not sure if that makes any difference.
As for the import in visualize itself, I have tried both appearance and automatic.
I haven't re-imported the emptied/simplified enclosure by itself to check the polygon counts, but I estimate a total of a couple hundred millions polygons in the current state of things.
Thanks
Large assemblies... particularly with a bunch of patterned stuff, is not handled as well as it could be in Visualize at the moment. It is very much on our radar to improve in the near future as there are things we should be doing to deal with patterned/instance geometry better.
Sounds like you're doing most of the things you can/should... Summary from my point of view:
Good luck. Hopefully we can roll out some updates in not so distant release that will improve a lot of these large assembly performance issues.