[DrMerman]

What's going on there then, eh?

I've been waiting about 3 hrs for MXCL to actually start producing an image and so far...nothing. It told me that it was going to 'Start Rendering', after which my CPU usage went down after about an hour, and my RAM usage has been at a stand still (it's now actually half what it was an hour ago.) It definitely pauses for longer with bigger renders so maybe it's something to do with the Voxelisation. But with the RAM usage not going up...

I'm really just curious if everyone else experiences this, or whether somewhere along the line something on my system got slightly confused. Or whether it's a bug. Either way I'm off to sleep

Cheers,

Dr Merman

[Mihai]

Are you using any displacement in the render? Perhaps you've set the precision much too high, or you're using motionblur also. It's not normal it should pause for such a long time though. I would try a render at a small resolution to see what's going on.

[DrMerman]

Mihai,

I've been doing some tests today, and it seems that I've found the problem - instances.

I've been setting up the scenes in Maya, exporting them to MXS and then loading them up in MXCL to render, using the 'Use Instances' checkbox in the Maya Plugin. With this on, the scene (a 4k render) paused for over 5 hours after 'Start Rendering' was displayed, after which I gave up. Without the 'Use Instances' option checked it only paused for 50mins - a time I'm much more used to (although I still find it slightly counter-intuitive )

With instances on, the displayed poly count in MXCL was around 400000, with it off it was around 730000, and the benchmark for both scenes is about the same - around 10.5. The peak ram usage is about 1.5GB, leaving plenty to spare. If it would be useful I could supply the scene for tests.

Many thanks,

Dr Merman

[Mihai]

Yes please Send me the scene if you can. Even 50min is pretty strange...

[DrMerman]

No problem. Give me twenty minutes

Dr Merman

[DrMerman]

Email sent! Thanks and good luck mate!

Dr Merman

[Mihai]

Thanks Doc!

I will look at it a bit more but for now, I can say it will take a long time for the actual render to start because you have all but the Shadow Pass channel activated. The only channels that render at the same time as the Render channel itself are the Alpha and Shadow pass channels. So first it's going to render the matID, objID, zbuffer before starting with the rest.

But there seems to be a problem here with processor usage, it looks like for some reason it's rendering these channels twice (matID,objID), once at 100% processor usage, and then starts again but at 50% usage. The channel images aren't identical either, one of them looks to have better AA.

You also have a displacement material in the scene so that's going to bring down the benchmark some more. Many of the materials look to be duplicated and also are a bit strange, you have a two layer material for example with one layer only weighted at 1. You might as well delete that layer in this case and save some memory on the maps used in it. Also take care not to set bump values so high (100 in some materials) as that will increase the render time and not necessarily make a stronger/better looking bump. With bump there's a limit anyway to what it can do.

I will try with the instances visible, no displacement and only the render channel selected to see why the instances in the scene drop the benchmark so much. It could be because you used SSS on the leafs, are you sure you need that?

[DrMerman]

Mihai,

Sorry for the late reply, it's been a hectic weekend

Thanks for taking a look at the scene-file. The reason that the materials are duplicating is to do with the fact that I'm using a lot of references in Maya to get the models into the scene, each of which has a copy of the materials that is then getting brought in. It was a mistake to not go through and clean it up so lesson learnt on that one

I realise that the SSS and the displacement both increase the render time, however I tried rendering without them and the resulting image lacked that extra punch that they brought to the scene.

It's interesting that the matID/objID channels are getting calculated twice. The only thing I'm doing that's really different to usual is using the larger amount of reference objects. Let me know if I can get you guys any other versions of the scene to take a look at, and thanks again for your help, mate.

Dr Merman

[Leonardo]

without reading everything... my wild guess is that you're running out of ram

try the same scene at a lower resolution and see what happens 640x400

[DrMerman]

Hey Leonardo

That was the first thing I thought as well, but nope, everything seems to be running silky smooth with room to spare. It basically calculates normally and then cuts CPU and ram usage by 50% and just...sits there for a few hours

Appreciate the input though, mate,

Matt

[Mihai]

I looked some more and yes some instances in this case slow down the render too much. It's complicated since it's not about the instance objects itself...it can be related to transforms of the original objects, or another real object intersecting the real object that has instances attached to it. So please render with the real objects for now.

Another thing, I noticed you have about 10 'sundisk' planes in your scene, all at exactly the same position. Did you do that intentionally?

[Leonardo]

Another thing, I noticed you have about 10 'sundisk' planes in your scene, all at exactly the same position. Did you do that intentionally?

ssssssssssssssssshhhh!

You are blowing away DrMerman's top secret formula for perfect skies

[DrMerman]

Hahaha <runs off to the patent office...>

Thanks Mihai, I'll make sure to turn off the instances for now. The sun-planes were indeed intentional, however were more of a quick fix than anything. I'm currently in the middle of about 5 deadlines so won't have much time to test until the weekend, but I'll put together another tidied version of the scene then and report back!

Cheers,
Dr Merman

[-Adrian]

That "bit between" is where MXCL is waiting for you to activate the Easter egg (Turbo Mode).