Autodesk says- don't use accurender plants

[bobo]

This is a reply I received from an Autodesk Client Service Architect - regarding a memory issue causing rendering to stop;

"One of my colleagues has just made me aware of another user who is experiencing a problem that exhibits similiar symptoms as yours. In his case our development staff identified a bug involving AccuRender Plants and resulting in a memory leak [http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/memory_leak.html].

If you are using AccuRender procedural plants in your model you are susceptible to this bug. To confirm that this is the cause of your problems, turn off these plants in your walkthrough and attempt to render it. A complete animation would equal confirmation in this case.

Assuming this is indeed the source of your difficulty, the workarounds are include:

1. Stop using procedural plants, substitute RPC plants or surface modeled plants.
2. Render short animations and splice them together."

This is really quite amazing, is Autodesk actually suggesting the program does not work as advertised and the fix is not to use the package the way it was intended? That is don't use accurender plants, buy additional and expensive RPC content (which may in itslef cause memory issues itself due to the large files) or patch bits and pieces of animation together in an unworkable manner.

I am annoyed I did not see issue clarified or advertised to potential buyers or receive a 'we are working on it' notice. Personally I am pretty disappointed and angry with the lack of acknowledgment from Autodesk of this apparent shortcoming.

I pasted this item from 'rendering' into this general section to see if others are similiarly afflicted and how wide spread an issue this is. Surely this is an issue for which we should have a formal response or a notification of fix or work on a fix from Autodesk?

[Martin P]

Its never come up, and I have rendered some forests!!! havent animated any mind you, I can imagine why if animating loads of accurender plants could cause memory problems. If its just a few plants I'd be annoyed but I presume you have many? can you say haw many plants you have in the animation?

I think the thing to bear in mind that Revit is not an animation program and doesnt really make any claims that it is, you can do basic animations without any problems. I dont think it was ever the intention for it to do lengthy large scale animations.

[bobo]

In response;

1. AVI's are quite different to still frames, memory implications rather different. Still frames are no problem for me either. I think the isue here is the failure of Accurender plants in AVI scenes.

2. I am talking of a relatively small animation of 15-20 seconds @ 25fps (if only it gets that far!), 400x320 pixels and perhaps 8 trees and 30 shrubs total. AVI's may slow down in normal circumstances, but should not stop with memory problems under these circumstances. Also, only 2 rpc people total in the scene.

[Martin P]

hmmm, not so good :? does seem a shame. I did do one animation with about 12 trees that was ok. Maybe its just certain plants or something? Maybe it could be a prompt for the whole accurender LT that we have to get an upgrade. Although that doesnt really help you in the short term unfortunately. Hope you can get it resolved somehow.

[dna]

this is really strange

i have done an animation with more than 100 trees and shrubs and a building size of about 300,000 square feet, stareted in revit 5.0 and ended in 6.0 it took a long time but actually did it (about a month) exterior run of about 36000 (or thereabouts) frames 600x480 pixels

i have to say that interior runs are totally different (takes a LOT longer)

pc specs
3.2Ghz P4HT 800Hz FSB
2.5Gb Ram
128Mb Geforce (not that it matters)

[PeterJ]

Were you going topost that animation or a piece of it, dna? I remeber the project and there being some discussion about whether it could be posted.

I'm sure the files are huge, but a clip would be veryinterestiung to see.

[dna]

the smallest clip i have is 7 Mb

[dna]

i'm attempting to post that clip on autodesk.revit.customer-gallery now

hopefully it'll be there soon, maybe i'll post more if this goes fine

[dna]

limit is 1.5Mb there

[PeterJ]

See my direct email for further comment.....

[bobo]

yes i do agree it is strange, but like you i have managed in previous versions to do extremely large render files. It would seem to be something possibly unique to version 6.1... as it is autodesk staff are reviewing the files in question as we speak, so hopefully I will receive a reply or indication of the problem soon...hopefully with some insights to share with you all...hopefully

[essdubbya]

I agree Autodesk's response is unhelpful
I use Revit for Landscape design and have created a number of Accurender plants (with mixed results). I have given up (for the moment) on trying to create complex avi's with large numbers of plants due to crashes (especially in 6.1). The size of the plant files (as indicated in the plant editor) may well be a factor.
The RPC's available (even if I could afford them) are virtually useless in Australia
On a positive note though I have found it easy to create new leaf opacity maps using a scanner (just scan the actual leaf as a black and white bitmap) and photoshop to reverse the image (white on a black background) and saving to the appropriate folder.