Exporting a heavily subdivided object with displacement map

starbase1

starbase1

May the sauce be with you
Hi All,
I have a model I use a lot of Mars, with a big displacement map and a LOT of subvivision. It pushes close to using all available windows memory and I have 96 Gb...

Now I'm trying to export the displaced geometry at as close to this resolution as i can get, but hitting a lot of problems.
I'm using "save transformed" and cranking up the display subdivision, (which it seems to be using), worked at level 50, but that's not really enough.
At 70 I got weird results - I'm also switching to a UV mapped texture instead of spherical mapped, and I suspect the sheer number of points in the UV map may be causing problems.

One attempt resulted in a clearly messed up UV texture.

Any ideas for this?
I'm going for FBX export or saving transformed as new LWO in case that helps.
And I'm way back on 11.6 to add to the fun and games.

All suggestions gratefully received.

Nick
 
As it's a closed sphere, cutting it up would make edges, and subdiv would mean the subdivided and exported chunks would not join up.
I think...

Nice idea thogh, thanks
 
In LW 2020.x:

If you load your object as a sub-d to Layout,
the application must keep both the original object and its frozen version in memory (and perhaps also the render version, if different from the display version).
Save Trans Object.. use Display SubPatch Level not Render SubPatch Level.
Such an object is converted to.. triangles.

If you load your sub-d object into the Modeler,
and use the Freeze tool, quads are created.
If you load your object into the Layout, it is still as quads.
What you can see when you change the viewport mode to Textured Shaded Wireframe.
If you press F9 in the 1st version (sub-d -> triangles), and press F9 in the 2nd version, you will see that the 1st has twice as many polygons as the 2nd,
reported in Render Status window.
 
Last edited:
In LW 2020, or possibly earlier, they added volume shapes. Although fairly slow to render, they have an infinite level of detail. So you can texture and displace the geometry with infinite amounts of detail. Applying your texture to these shapes works nicely and it works particularly well for planetary scale items.

You said you're using LW 11.6, so obviously this isn't a viable option. Sooo, you probably need to conserve as much RAM as possible.
Are there Colour Space options, and if so do you have an option in there to 'Convert 8-bit to Float'?

Try turning this off, it should half the amount of RAM use on your scene, so possibly free up memory for other operations?
Also, as I'm sure you know... Layout and Modeller don't share textures in RAM, so both will grab hold of RAM for loading those textures... So ensure you're using one or the other, but not both at the same time.
 
LW 2019 might be an option, I bought it. But every time I try and run layout it instantly crashes.

And "support" just told me to ask in the forums.
 
Sensei said:
In LW 2020.x:

If you load your object as a sub-d to Layout,
the application must keep both the original object and its frozen version in memory (and perhaps also the render version, if different from the display version).
Save Trans Object.. use Display SubPatch Level not Render SubPatch Level.
Such an object is converted to.. triangles.

If you load your sub-d object into the Modeler,
and use the Freeze tool, quads are created.
If you load your object into the Layout, it is still as quads.
What you can see when you change the viewport mode to Textured Shaded Wireframe.
If you press F9 in the 1st version (sub-d -> triangles), and press F9 in the 2nd version, you will see that the 1st has twice as many polygons as the 2nd,
reported in Render Status window.
Click to expand...
So if I understand correctly, I should create a very high polygon count sphere in modeller, and apply a displacement map to that directly, without subdivisions?
That might work...

Is there a way to work out how many polygons will be in a tessellation sphere for a given level?

Thanks!
 
starbase1 said:
LW 2019 might be an option, I bought it. But every time I try and run layout it instantly crashes.

And "support" just told me to ask in the forums.
Click to expand...
Ah, that might be the GPU issue some people had. It was something to do with the Nvidia denoiser DLL i think.
There are some notes on it here.

https://forums.newtek.com/threads/l...3090-3070-suggestion-test-idea-thread.164711/

Here's the docs on the shape things:
 
starbase1 said:
LW 2019 might be an option, I bought it. But every time I try and run layout it instantly crashes.

And "support" just told me to ask in the forums.
Click to expand...

Just Fix it,
you are sitting with wasted money and technology that otherwise really should and would benefit you, It´s not supposed to be there with spent money to make you get dissapointed with customer support.
Update graphics drivers, delete the installation fully, re-install.

With the shape item, you will not have much of a memory issue I think, and as much as detail displayed as your displacement map allows depending on resolution.
It may be a litte slow to render perhaps, but with subpatches you still have to wait for the system to freeze the subpatch before rendering.

Another option would to try the free octane for lightwave which I believe have a similar function as the shape item, or invest in a commercial version if that won´t to or shape item won´t do either.

So I would first update graphics drivers delete lightwave 2019 and configs to that, re-install, reboot.

Since you are asked by the support team at newtek to get support on the forums ..(sigh)
It would help if you provide system info of your hardware, operating system, GPU etc.
Mine is windows 10
LW 2019.1.5

Once you got your already payed for lw 2019 version going, you will also benefit from more realistic stuff for volumetrics, volume items, vdb import, a rough crude fluid system and much more.
With VDB import you can also use blender for free to shape clouds geometricly by sculpting and other methods, convert mesh to volume, add volume displace, save out to UDZ format, which will give you a folder of VDB volumes that you then can import with the VDB tools in lightwave and render in there if you prefer to stay as much as possible in Lightwave, but benefit from other tools that can do things Lightwave doesn´t do so well.
 
Excellent, thanks for the help!

I've worked out the numbers for a tessalation sphere,
Basically level 1 has 20 polygons
Level 2 has 80 polygons

Each step up of 1 level adds 40 more polygons than the last one.

(I knocked up a spreadsheet in Excel), Level 1200 has 28.8 million polygons...
 
prometheus said:
Just Fix it,
you are sitting with wasted money and technology that otherwise really should and would benefit you, It´s not supposed to be there with spent money to make you get dissapointed with customer support.
Update graphics drivers, delete the installation fully, re-install.

With the shape item, you will not have much of a memory issue I think, and as much as detail displayed as your displacement map allows depending on resolution.
It may be a litte slow to render perhaps, but with subpatches you still have to wait for the system to freeze the subpatch before rendering.

Another option would to try the free octane for lightwave which I believe have a similar function as the shape item, or invest in a commercial version if that won´t to or shape item won´t do either.

So I would first update graphics drivers delete lightwave 2019 and configs to that, re-install, reboot.

Since you are asked by the support team at newtek to get support on the forums ..(sigh)
It would help if you provide system info of your hardware, operating system, GPU etc.
Mine is windows 10
LW 2019.1.5

Once you got your already payed for lw 2019 version going, you will also benefit from more realistic stuff for volumetrics, volume items, vdb import, a rough crude fluid system and much more.
With VDB import you can also use blender for free to shape clouds geometricly by sculpting and other methods, convert mesh to volume, add volume displace, save out to UDZ format, which will give you a folder of VDB volumes that you then can import with the VDB tools in lightwave and render in there if you prefer to stay as much as possible in Lightwave, but benefit from other tools that can do things Lightwave doesn´t do so well.
Click to expand...
Ah, I was not seriously expecting anyone on these forums to be able to answer the install question, though it looks like I have once again underestimated the users here.

As I have the same graphics card as the others on the link, it looks like I'm on my way!
:)
 
It'd be nice if the support guys pointed you towards that thread, but glad it's been documented by others and I'm sort of pleased you have the GPU on the list too :)
Good luck!
 
starbase1 said:
Ah, I was not seriously expecting anyone on these forums to be able to answer the install question, though it looks like I have once again underestimated the users here.

As I have the same graphics card as the others on the link, it looks like I'm on my way!
:)
Click to expand...

On contrary for this point in time with regards of the lack of LW resources in their own staff, maybe I was wrong, maybe you should expect someone on the forums here to answer, and maybe that is why they pointed you to the forums due to lack of own resources.
It´s perhaps nothing wrong with that considering the current status they are in, but otherwise I would expect an answer from customer support.

The users here are still quite a few, and a lot of them have been in similar situations I would suspect, and evidently...they could point you to threads and the coverage of the issues.

Good Luck Spaceman. 🚀👨‍🚀
 
In all seriousness, the best thing about Lightwave has long been it's user community, second to none. (And I've been a user since version 5.6)

I just miss the days when the Newtek staff matched their users. I still have fond memories of the time a bunch of them flew to London, to meet a shedload of us, and find out face to face what we thought. I don't know of any other US company that ever did that.
 

best thing to do now is to develop your own LScripts and LW workflows.

'cause there won't be major changes to LightWave in a long-long time...

 
starbase1 said:
In all seriousness, the best thing about Lightwave has long been it's user community, second to none. (And I've been a user since version 5.6)

I just miss the days when the Newtek staff matched their users. I still have fond memories of the time a bunch of them flew to London, to meet a shedload of us, and find out face to face what we thought. I don't know of any other US company that ever did that.
Click to expand...

Well..not my opinion, it´s not the best thing about Lightwave, just an additional bonus as a member of a user community, but such glory days are entangled with the product itself in the end, and the tone in the forums, which will go up and down in quality from time to time.

Less users of Lightwave, lesser people will remain in the forums, as well as a lesser good tone will cause lesser people to make the forum vibrant.
 

i've personally have that covered.

i also have uploaded about 1700 LightWave videos now (bows head in shame)
should be an Okay reference.

a big minus is that people are leaving LightWave,
even though that is inevitable, it is happening at a fast phase now.

i also wish that more peple kept making LightWave plugins.

quiet days.

 
erikals said:
i've personally have that covered.

i also have uploaded about 1700 LightWave videos now (bows head in shame)
should be an Okay reference.

a big minus is that people are leaving LightWave,
even though that is inevitable, it is happening at a fast phase now.

i also wish that more peple kept making LightWave plugins.

quiet days.
Click to expand...

Nothing lasts, not even my fat belly, in the end ..it has to go, how´s that for being positive :)

As for leaving lightwave? such it seem to be..
it´s a natural cycle, it´s wakes, if people leave, less interest ..less fuzz, it even affects me to not make any Lw related videos, loosing interest in that sort of.

You may be one of those taking the last stand :)
Seems users are getting heavily subdivided by the current state.
 
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