www.kraytracing.com

a simple question: which method are faster? (with Kray renderer)

Last time I checked, Kray doesn't render HDI's instancing with shadows and such. Can someone correct or confirm this?

Almost the same if you have the same quality settings in lw and kray. To get clean renders you have to up AA and lw and kray seem to render equally. I can test for you if you have a simple file.
I think kray would win if you have a lot of instances in an interior or enclosed environment where kray gi renderer is big factor. But ofcourse the offset animation in hdi is like a mini Massive crowd simulator

Short answer: Kray.

Long answer: HDi used to work too but lately they made some changes to the plugin that doesn't seem to work anymore. You can try and ask the author if they want to add Kray support but last time we tried they did not respond.

if i get your question correctly, you need to know which method is better/faster.
Well, HDI has an extremely good placement tool, better than kray's. Beside this, Kray's instances are much, much faster and look better.
I never tried to make a on-pair comparison, but if you compute HDi's with full GI, i can bet Kray is more than 10c faster.
Krays' quality is superior in lot of cases; i.e. for vegetation. Kray can compute very fast translucency and blurred reflections on leaves, HDI is nearly at a freeze with this kind of surfacing.
We asked Fyffe to allow Kray see HDi instances, but by now it doesnt work.

Paolo

Any chance we'll see HDI-like placement options, and instance offset animation in Kray any time soon?

jwiede wrote:Any chance we'll see HDI-like placement options, and instance offset animation in Kray any time soon?

It depends on what you cosider by "soon". It's definitely on to-do list but it needs some work...

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showpost.p ... stcount=50
so that's a no for hdi integration.

Hi, there. I've been looking everywhere for a decent Instancing solution for LW. I heard about this bug with HD Instance that causes ridicilously long render time with animation offsets and ScreamerNet. Users also reported of inconsistent render times between F9 and F10. I wrote Graham asking if this problem was resolved but got no answer so far.
My main goal is to generate a large scale crowd animation. I can live without animation offsets (I'll just use the same model instanced with different offsets manually).

So my question for you guys is this: Can Kray instance Bones and / or MDD driven objects?
I wrote an email with the same question for the developer and got no asnwer.

I appriciate your help.

Royie

As far as I know you can do crowd animation in kray the same way the old hdinstance 1.8 did.
Basically you have 5-10 different people animated, then distribute those randomly in via kray instance.

... And even if Kray instances aren't as powerful (in term of possibilities) as HDInstance's ones, they really are a godsend for any lightwaver who needs hundreds of thousand instances in there scenes !

Doing some archviz stuff now, i have been able to instanciate without any problem (even tested on lightwave 32bit to see if it was working, and it's a big yes !) like 250,000 trees, each of them were in the 300,000/600,000 polygons range !!

And it starts rendering right away, like in 2 or 3 seconds, the instances are "loaded" in the render engine, whereas i did a test in modo with half the number of instances and i got an "intializing tableau" for like 1 hour before the rendering could start effectively !

Just my 2c on this, and a big THANKS to Gregorsz for his amazing plugin !


Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette