Monsterland
Since the release of Blender 5.0, I've been obsessing over how its improvements should unlock the power to do much bigger renders, or at least do them more reliably and efficiently.So I gave it a smoke test. A smoke test is when you run something harder and faster until smoke starts to come out. If testing for smoke is the aim, I succeeded:
Your device ran into a problem. System automatically restarted.
Oh boy, it's dark in this resource-hungry terrain generation rabbit hole... But interesting!
I created a 32km x 32km terrain in World Creator, which I exported as four 1GB EXR height map tiles.
To bring this monster into Blender, TrueTerrain 5 is a great solution because it lets you import tiles and place them on a single terrain. World Creator as a Blender Bridge, which is good for some things but not nearly as powerful or flexible as True-VFX's terrain powerhouse!
1) Opening the True-Terrain tab, I created new terrain, setting the size to 32,000m. You'll definitely need camera culling enabled on this mission, but not yet. You need to get the tiles aligned, which is easier when you can see the whole thing.
2) Load your first EXR tile into True Terrain, making the terrain your full size, but then adjusting the displacement map so that it's (in my case) a quarter of the terrain's overall size (16,000m). I also exaggerated the displacement so I could more easily check I had the tiles loaded in the right places. At the 32km scale, even great mountains aren't much more than bumps!
3) Load in each of the times, adjusting its size and using the transform tools. Use the File settings to adjust the tile size, then place each tile in the appropriate location by assigning offsets in the Location fields. For example, the first terrain was set to 8000 m on the X-axis and -8000 m on the Y-axis. You might see a seam where the tiles meet in the viewport, but I think this is a resampling artefact, as it comes and goes with changes to the terrain resolution.
Check that your tiles are correctly aligned. Then, if you exaggerated the terrain's Height multiplier, now is the time to correct it.
4) Adjust the terrain's resolution to meet your needs and match your system's capabilities. Definitely use camera culling if you can; it can allow you to render more detailed terrains, since anything not in the camera view or padding isn't sent to the renderer.
In the last few years, Blender has seen some incredible leaps in performance, culminating in Blender 5's increased frame buffer that enables support for huge meshes, free normals and some really nice optomisations, such as with Adapative Subdivision, with the new "Object Space" option that allows a single high-detail mesh to be instanced many times with minimal memory usage, as the subdivision is calculated once per object, independent of the camera's view. This drastically reduces the memory footprint for scenes with many repeated complex objects, like environmental assets.
To bring this monster into Blender, TrueTerrain 5 is a great solution because it lets you import tiles and place them on a single terrain. World Creator as a Blender Bridge, which is good for some things but not nearly as powerful or flexible as True-VFX's terrain powerhouse!
1) Opening the True-Terrain tab, I created new terrain, setting the size to 32,000m. You'll definitely need camera culling enabled on this mission, but not yet. You need to get the tiles aligned, which is easier when you can see the whole thing.
2) Load your first EXR tile into True Terrain, making the terrain your full size, but then adjusting the displacement map so that it's (in my case) a quarter of the terrain's overall size (16,000m). I also exaggerated the displacement so I could more easily check I had the tiles loaded in the right places. At the 32km scale, even great mountains aren't much more than bumps!
3) Load in each of the times, adjusting its size and using the transform tools. Use the File settings to adjust the tile size, then place each tile in the appropriate location by assigning offsets in the Location fields. For example, the first terrain was set to 8000 m on the X-axis and -8000 m on the Y-axis. You might see a seam where the tiles meet in the viewport, but I think this is a resampling artefact, as it comes and goes with changes to the terrain resolution.
Check that your tiles are correctly aligned. Then, if you exaggerated the terrain's Height multiplier, now is the time to correct it.
4) Adjust the terrain's resolution to meet your needs and match your system's capabilities. Definitely use camera culling if you can; it can allow you to render more detailed terrains, since anything not in the camera view or padding isn't sent to the renderer.
In the last few years, Blender has seen some incredible leaps in performance, culminating in Blender 5's increased frame buffer that enables support for huge meshes, free normals and some really nice optomisations, such as with Adapative Subdivision, with the new "Object Space" option that allows a single high-detail mesh to be instanced many times with minimal memory usage, as the subdivision is calculated once per object, independent of the camera's view. This drastically reduces the memory footprint for scenes with many repeated complex objects, like environmental assets.
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| Stop holding Blender in portrait mode! ;-) |
Home truths
Throwing more vertices onto a screen doesn't make better art or bigger, more engaging terrain renders. It's a capability worth measuring so you know how far you might go when needed. I made some heavy volume adjustments while testing and got my entire system to auto-reset. This is likely not a deficiency; it's just asking Blender and your computer system to do something that is the rendering equivalent of jumping off a cliff. You can forget doing elaborate animations or terrain-wide scattering, unless you add some optimisation steps.
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