Is this normal? (Enscape + SU + Skatter)

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  • Before I share my problem, I must say that Sketchup does really often freeze alot in bit bigger projects, for 3 tot 15 seconds sometimes, and GPU/RAM/CPU is not peaking at all, so I don't know what is happening there. Maybe this has to do something with it.


    So today I'm testing out Skatter and see how good it works with Enscape/Sketchup since I read alot of people are pretty happy with it. But long story short, my computer just barely can take it. Because I have created a flat plane of 50 by 50meters with 1 Oak in the middle. And as soon as I add some grass (or other elements) via skatter to the canvas, my computer just struggles so much.


    I have Ryzen 7 1700x with 32gb ram and a RTX 2070 Super (newest drivers) working together.


    I've created a screen video capture (you can just press play and don't need to download it) to show how slow it becomes. First just normal and as soon as I add skatter stuff, it happens. I hope this is not 'normal' because for me it looks unworkable. -> https://bygeelco.stackstorage.com/s/t23bUbGPWZDtUc2

  • well, it is quite hard to tell what the problem is (for me at least, hehe), but here are a couple of observations:


    total poly count:

    How detailed are the grass elements you are trying to scatter? if they are very heavy in geometry, and you scatter a couple of thousands around, that can be ALOT of triangles.

    I always try to optimize my proxies as much as possible, to keep the performance ok: Reduce polycount (in something like transmutr or skimp), reduce the texture size, and limit the amount of different assets to as few as possible.

    also, 50x50 meters is quite a big plane to do with skatter and grass. you might consider reducing it to only the foreground part of the image. with that said, i have done large areas before, and with the right optimizations it will run. But the framerate will suffer quite a bit!


    RTX:

    Have you tried to disable RTX in the settings? this has caused some crashed for me in the past... although that is mostly because RTX is really Vram intensive, and on large projects 8 gigs on a normal high end card simply is not enough.

    In the video you show this does not seem to be the problem, but if you experience crashes on large projects, try and disable it!


    general performace.

    In the beginning of the video (with the enscape grass) the framerate does not seem great. This might be because of the video encoding, but if the framerate is indeed low in real life, then there might be an issue with the machine. A scene like that, on a computer like that, should run very fast!


    here are some projects where i have used skatter to a great extend, but keep in mind that these scenes are NOT meant for realtime walkthroughs! the framerate is barely over 10-15 in these cases:


    Ruins in the forrest


    New Grass


    Philip Johnson's Glass House WIP

  • Hey Herbo,


    I was kinda hoping you would react, since I have seen your wonderfull work and I know you are very familiar with these tools.


    The video recording was already lagging a bit, because the Enscape grass works like a charm. But I would say 60+ to 120 fps, but I can't measure, it just looks very smooth.


    But the standard Skatter grass which I used as a model in this videotest, made it tear down the performance to like 5/10 fps, like you are mentioning. And as you could see it was just 9817 objects of Skatter grass + 1 oak.


    My purpose will be for clients to walk through pretty large models and some places will be up to 5.000 m2 and some even up to 10.000 including landscaping + architecture, so I guess 'that amount of detail' is off the table...


    I will try the RTX off setting to see if it works better. Maybe I was expecting a bit too much unreal engine 5 stuff with Enscape. Where they claim to have pretty much limitless geometry (over billions of polygons).8)

  • DeKoetsier - If you continue to have issues with this, please provide some log files to our support team via the Enscape Feedback button. Thanks.

  • I think I just overasked the software. I did the same test in TM and found out that these grasses had over 54 million of polygons on the 50 x 50 plane. I did not spot them correctly, since there was also "grass" in the name, so the keyword triggered the Enscape grass as well, which made it look less detailed than it was.


    So I guess I just have to carefully implement items via Skatter.


    Ps. Is there a way to see how much polygons are in a scene/project which are being rendered by Enscape?

  • DeKoetsier - Yes, Skatter can kill a project file if too many instances are created, and its better to start with a low number of instances, rather than just start with many.


    So, you want some kind of Scene Inspector is what it sounds like your asking for. We don't currently have that ability within Enscape, but it has been discussed before, so I have created a Feature Request for this on your behalf.