topic Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons in Modeling

Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

Anonymous — Wed, 24 May 2023 06:26:27 GMT

Hi everyone,

I am having huge speed issues and its doubly frustrating because making each panel that I need takes so long in itself and then they are not complying.

I am working on a project with a 60' tall 'perforated' brick screen that is slanted and skewed. To make this screen I have used a complex profile of each panel, clicked every single hole i need to make with the magic wand, then place it, and convert to a morph so it lets me slant it.

I have 5 panels to make. The first was slow. The second was unbearable. The program is taking forever to do everything EVEN when I have the layers with the screen off.

So my question is-

Is there any better way to make this wall - bear in mind I need it to cast interior shadows through the perforations and I need to do a dusk rendering with interior light glowing through the holes.

If there is no better way,

Is there a way I can get the program to run better when the layer is off. Or is there a simpler view mode I can use. I am using monochrome with shadows off right now.

Thanks for any help I'm getting very frustrated with this!

Thanks

Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

Bruce — Sun, 26 Nov 2017 07:39:03 GMT

You could try using the shell tool, which allows holes to be placed directly into it.

You could also try turning your perforated panels into objects, instead of ARCHICAD trying to maintain hole calculations done with morphs.

If you post an image, I’m sure others will have even better ideas

Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

Anonymous — Sun, 26 Nov 2017 13:54:31 GMT

Bruce those are some great ideas, the object one sounds very promising! If this works I cannot express how excited I will be, thank you so much, here is a photo if anyone else has ideas or you have another

Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

Anonymous — Sun, 26 Nov 2017 13:57:56 GMT

another image

Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

Barry Kelly — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:42:43 GMT

Post moved.
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Barry.

Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

Steve Jepson — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 01:37:31 GMT

So where did you move it A good way to do that is not modeling. You can cut those holes Rendering. link to some images http://forums.cgarchitect.com/15503-new-moebius-ring-torolf-15.html

Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

Karl Ottenstein — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 18:53:50 GMT

Steve wrote:
So where did you move it A good way to do that is not modeling. You can cut those holes Rendering. link to some images http://forums.cgarchitect.com/15503-new-moebius-ring-torolf-15.html

Agree. I would never model a perforated surface because of what the OP noted ... too many polygons (and a ton of work). This is the same thing as posted over many years - where people asked how to model chain link fencing, or window screens - and the answer is that you don't (or shouldn't) - that's what alpha masked surfaces are for.

Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

Bruce — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 18:59:21 GMT

When I last tried alpha masked surfaces for something similar (admittedly it was in AC13), the result was a zero-depth looking element. Good for things like what you have listed (fences, balustrades, window screens), Karl, but not really that good for elements with any real depth to them - especially if the render camera will be reasonably close.

Has this changed in more recent versions?

Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

mikas — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 21:40:01 GMT

I brought my Mac Pro 8-core 32GB RAM down with ArchiCAD 19 last year with some perforations tests. I think I filled all my RAM, cinerender went to use mass storage (SSD), and everything just died.

But anyway, me neither do not recommend too heavy renders - renders will practically never come to their end if there is not enough RAM.

I agree that there are some great pseudo perforated surface materials and new ones can be created to look like real perforations. It's just that for me it is more natural to design them with ArchiCAD tools than with photo editors and cinerender materials editor.

The test (seen in the above link) went through to end a few times after I adjusted the settings low enough. You can see (from that same picture again) that there are not tens of thousands of holes, merely thousands only I would say. They are round holes, so we understand that it makes them computionally "heavier" than what square holes would be.

My memory usage looked like (pic attached) this just before crash. Or maybe not crash, maybe just a permanent enough stall, I would say.

That was AC19. I had to say cinerenderNEM does not seem to use that much of my memory any more. It might have been evolved a lot, at least the version number of it is higher today.

Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

Lingwisyer — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 01:29:39 GMT

Bruce wrote:
When I last tried alpha masked surfaces for something similar (admittedly it was in AC13), the result was a zero-depth looking element. Good for things like what you have listed (fences, balustrades, window screens), Karl, but not really that good for elements with any real depth to them - especially if the render camera will be reasonably close.

As far as I've managed to get, that hasn't changed and by how alpha texturing works, I wouldn't expect it to change. What would be nice though would be a way to produce a displacement channel from an alpha by inserting a delta value for 0% to 100% black.

Ling

Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

Karl Ottenstein — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 03:47:10 GMT

Bruce wrote:
When I last tried alpha masked surfaces for something similar (admittedly it was in AC13), the result was a zero-depth looking element. Good for things like what you have listed (fences, balustrades, window screens), Karl, but not really that good for elements with any real depth to them - especially if the render camera will be reasonably close.

Has this changed in more recent versions?

Good point, Bruce! For a close up of a thick element, it would at best look hollow with holes on opposite sides. Didn't feel like it was that massive in the sample images, but yeah... you're right.

A different possibility to lighten the polygon load is the old GDL trick of changing the resolution of the holes depending on how close the perspective camera is to the hole. When November55 used the magic wand to cut the holes, they became static openings, with as many polygons as the magic wand resolution settings at the time. (Lowering the magic wand settings dramatically first might have helped if there were no super close views of the holes.) With a camera-distance sensitive object, using hexagons far from the camera and higher edged polygons closer to the camera, the polygon burden could be reduced. Would have to be something like a skylight and not a solid element subtract - that many SEOps would probably kill things, too. But, I don't know if skylights/windows/doors can query the distance from the camera the same way a standalone object can. Too many years since I played with all of that.

Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

Hmooslechner — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 10:13:38 GMT

Have You tried to make a GDL from the original form when finished? GDLs are much faster displayed compared to the original Morphs or what ever You have used.

That could speed up the thing a lot.

suggested workflow:

An extra archicad-Session for one Paneel.

After you have your perforated pannel - select it and make a new librarypart-copy of it.

Then You draw this from one Archicad-Session into the other collecting-file-session, then no slow morph is implemented.

Try it!

proof of concept - german, AC19, but worth looking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W27GRg5HLh0

Re: Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

Hmooslechner — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 11:12:19 GMT

english vid-totorial AC21 slow Macbook, Workflow..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjBVIeeYSDw