> Quote - As for the polygons they seem to me to be equally distributed but maybe I'm not looking for what you are looking for.  ... > I am finding this confusing because it's really not a complex scene, 1 figure, 1 prop that's med poly size and Poser is borking. (???)

Figure count and prop count have little to do with memory. It is polygon count, and micro-polygon count.

Equally distributed has nothing to do with it. It's a question of which polygons intersect whatever bucket Poser is rendering at the moment.

I took your drawing and tried to show what happens. The green square is a bucket. Within it, a whole bunch of your radial polygons are visible. Each one, no matter how small a piece is visible, is completely broken up into micro-polygons. These micro-polygons are how smoothing happens, and also displacement. With min shading rate of .2, you get about 5 micro-polygons per rendered pixel. However, this includes pixels outside the bucket, since it's all or nothing - either a polygon is subdivided or it isn't, entirely based on whether any part of it is visible in the bucket being rendered.

I tried to flood fill all the floor polygons that would be subdivided if the bucket lands there. The front one that just covers the corner of the bucket wouldn't flood fill properly so I scribbled over it.

Anyway, all those green polygons will be recorded as tiny micro-polygons while working on that bucket. That's a lot. The issue is because you have a lot of thin but otherwise large polygons concentrated in the center. Any bucket in that area will be subdividing nearly half the floor.

The whole point of bucket rendering is to avoid having to process a large subset of the geometry. It is the fundamental way in which memory needs are greatly reduced from non-bucket based rendering techniques. But when you make a bunch of rather large polygons fit into one bucket, you lose the benefit.

If the topology was of a bunch of relatively small polygons, then even if there are more, that isn't the dominant factor. The dominant factor would be that you would only be getting micro-polygons for a small subset of the floor, which overall is very large. As it is now, a large subset is being built - literally millions of micro-polygons are being created.

---

Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)