I have been experimenting with the 3D Grass texture since upgrading to Artlantis 2020 from V5 in January, and have had some issues when renderings contain these textures. The firm I work for designs schools for the most part, so what renderings I do contain lawn in many cases over a thousand feet away from the camera. This has raised two primary questions:
1) What is generally considered the maximum distance for 3D grass from the camera Artlantis can handle?
In a test I put together this morning, placing the 3D grass texture in concentric circles in 50’ increments from the camera (picture an archery target/bullseye with the camera set in the middle), the rendering would crash when trying to render a continuous 3D grass surface more than 150’ away from the camera. I’m curious as to whether it’s a program limitation or a hardware limitation on my end. For reference my current desktop setup is an i7-9800X CPU with 16 GB DDR4 RAM and a Radeon Pro WX5100 GPU. When I begin a rendering containing 3D grass beyond 150’ from the camera, the rendering never even starts the estimating phase. Via Task Manager and HWMonitor, I see RAM and Disk hit 100% usage, and after about 3-5 minutes, the computer becomes unresponsive (caps lock/num lock don’t even turn the indicator lights on the keyboard on or they are delayed by 10-30 seconds, normally indicating a crash). From there, I either have to hard reset the computer or wait for Artlantis to crash. The first time this occurred, I left the program running, thinking it would eventually get past it. Artlantis crashed after spending 1.5 hours in the estimating phase. This problem also seems to arise from large 3D tree objects, which did not cause issues in V5. From here, the question becomes whether increasing the amount of RAM in the system would help, otherwise, on to question two.
2) Is there a way to change the texture under the 3D grass to one of the other lawn textures, such that the remainder of a large site doesn’t look like dirt once the grass fades out?
My apologies for the long-winded post, but these issues are plaguing my recent attempts to produce renderings for clients, and I am trying to figure out the best method to work around them. I appreciate any advice you may have.