Perforated brick wall - too many polygons

[Anonymous]

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

[Bruce]

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

[Anonymous]

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

[Anonymous]

another image

[Barry Kelly]

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Barry.

[Steve Jepson]

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

[Karl Ottenstein]

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.

[Bruce]

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?

[mikas]

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.

[Lingwisyer]

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