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slow stage redraw
Hey there particle posters
I have just started using particle illusion 3 over the last month or so and am loving it!
Did Elvis’s disentegrating logo tutorial – excellent tut, thanks elvis.Now Im trying to use a similiar approach (get colour from layer) in some HD shots Im working on (particles forming together to create people who have come through a time warp) but am having issues with the speed. Not sure if its just the high resolution of the background image I have loaded (1920 x 1080 tga seq with alpha) or something else but it can be quite slow to redraw at times. Am on a brand new HP xw 8200 dual xeon, fast GPU etc so thinkig its not the hardware.. Lowering the number of particles emitted helps (simple set up – only one line emitter) but Im wondering are there any other properties that can be hungry on system resources? Just wanting an interactive preview of the stage so I can get the look right then up the properties for rendering in pIllusionRender. The preview pane its really interactive which is great.
With all this in mind I have been wondering if it would be possible to implement something into the gui that showed the user when the system is processing – ala the Mac spinning color ball of death? Apart from all this moaning I think its an excellent app. Wonder Touch – top stuff
Cheers – Leon
“That that is, is”
William Shakespere -
5 Replies
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I find TGAs very slow to use when doing just about anything, not only in pI. Even at 640×360 for the rough renders of the short I’m working on, TGA sequences slow my system down quite a bit whether it be in pI, Vegas, or After Effects, I guess since every frame is a couple of mbs.
Granted, I don’t have a machine nearly as powerful as yours, but it could be something worth looking into, especially since you’re dealing with HD res. You may want to convert the TGAs to PNG just to get a speed boost (there’s a free viewer called XNView that can batch convert TGAs to PNG and keep the alpha channel intact). Even if you just use the PNGs as temp footage and replace them with the TGA sequence again at render time, it might help.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
Awesome thanks Elvis – Definately faster with PNGs and that XnView utility is excellent! Thanks a bunch
Cheers – Leon
“That that is, is”
William Shakespere -
Interesting. I didn’t think that file format would make much of a difference. I wonder if somebody has the time to do more of a comparison and find out how much faster/slower different image formats are? I’d like to see numbers too, for instance:
Using 720×480 image sequence, 300 frames:
TGA: xx.x fps
PNG: xx.x fps
JPG: xx.x fpsMaybe even try an AVI using DivX or something. One thing to note is that the first time pIllusion plays an image sequence or movie, it’s slower. After the first time through, Windows has cached some/all of the frames, so it plays faster.
Anybody up for doing this comparison?
Also, I suggest going into pIllusion preferences and checking “do not use texture RAM for bg images” on the OpenGL page. This will probably increase performance as well.
Alan.
wondertouch -
Well these are kinda interesting results. It’d be nice to see someone else try a similar test
All I had was a 270 frame sequence at 1280×720 resolution. I shrunk them down for the first part of the test
So while TGAs play faster at a standard resolution than PNGs, they are much slower at a HD res (at least on my system).
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
Hmmm. Another thing you might want to do (if you didn’t already) is to set your project framerate to something high, like 60 fps. You might see the 32 and 30 fps values go up.
Alan.
wondertouch
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