Speeding up my Vray workflow OSX

[Bertjenkins]

Hi, I'm looking for some advice about speeding up my vray rendering workflows.


I'm working on a short film with around 40 shots built in maya (2012) and to be rendered in vray.
I'm working on 2/3 mac pro's (OSX 10.6.8. The project is HD and I'm having real issues with my day to day workflow. Tweaking renders is just taking way too long with vray, and i am spending all day twiddling my thumbs waiting for texture and lighting tweaks and no time actually working. I have tweaked the vray settings and found the fastest GI settings. The renders look great, however if i carry on like this it's going to take a year! I'm working in linear colourspace and the scenes are mainly architectural in feel, although there is some animation too.


As far as i can see i have 3 options:


1. Build all my textures in viewport 2.0 with maya shaders, push this as far as i can go, use maya lights for speed then change all the lights and shaders to vray right at the end. Does any one use this method or is it lunacy?


2. Try to get vray RT up and running. Maybe I need a new graphics card? So far the Vray RT never seems to update, or takes ages. Using the IPR/ Vray pop up seems to be very unreliable, even with CPU rendering, and my ATI radeon HD 5770 doesn't seem do give me any GPU rendering. Am i doing something wrong? Should i get a quadro or 5870?


3. Buy a new machine. Is OSX a no- no with Vray? Would i get much more speed from an HP z600/ z800/ z820? Or will i just be in the same situation?


can anyone advise on any of these (or all)? any help would be much appreciated

[vlado]

It would be useful if you can get us an example of what kind of scenes you are dealing with to vraymaya@chaosgroup.com

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

1. Build all my textures in viewport 2.0 with maya shaders, push this as far as i can go, use maya lights for speed then change all the lights and shaders to vray right at the end. Does any one use this method or is it lunacy?

That would be a no. Viewport 2.0 is very limited, don't expect it to give you proper result. Using maya lights will also do the same, i.e you will get different result with vray lights. If you literally are waiting for each render a long time, here is a couple of things you can do:

- Identify what is causing the slowdown. Is it large amount of geometry? large amount of textures? displacements? slow network speed? etc.

- After you know what is causing your render to be long, you can take measures to speed them up:

If you have a large amount of textures, you may benefit from using tiled exrs. Tiled exrs optimize the sizes of the textures based on the distance from camera, so for further objects the load smaller tiles, thus render much faster. Alternatively, you can make re-sized versions of your current textures, for example how we used to do this before tiled exrs came around was create a source folder with original maps, and make 3-4 folders with re-sized maps, like 1k, 2k, 3k, 4k...and then switch them in the scene with a script.

For large amounts of geometry see if you are running out of ram, if ram is fine, but its the pre-render export that takes a lot of time, perhaps turning them into proxies will speed things up.

2. Try to get vray RT up and running. Maybe I need a new graphics card? So far the Vray RT never seems to update, or takes ages. Using the IPR/ Vray pop up seems to be very unreliable, even with CPU rendering, and my ATI radeon HD 5770 doesn't seem do give me any GPU rendering. Am i doing something wrong? Should i get a quadro or 5870?

vray rt is still being developed, and I am not sure what sort of support they have for mac's, but in my experience rt seems to be less stable.

3. Buy a new machine. Is OSX a no- no with Vray? Would i get much more speed from an HP z600/ z800/ z820? Or will i just be in the same situation?

What kind of machine do you have now? problem is if you have a mix of mac's and pc this will create extra overhead for you in terms of management. I also read somewhere that render results vary between mac's and pc, but Vlado would be able to better clarify that statement.

Few years ago I had invested into a xeon workstation, it has 12 physical cores (2 6 core cpus) 24 gb of ram, ssd drive, nvidia card etc. While it was expensive (5.5K) it was well worth the money, you know computers depreciate like crazy, and this machine performs very well even some years later. These days though, I would probably go for a powerful i7. The reason I prefer pc over mac for work, is they are much cheaper in maintenance and you get more bang for your buck.

[snivlem]

Have a read through this as well, it's very technical but you can understand a lot of things it translates well into getting better settings for V-Ray where it can get to the point where it is not only faster, but much cleaner rendering as well in some cases.

http://interstation3d.com/tutorials/...yfing_dmc.html

[Bertjenkins]

Thanks so much for the reply.

I'm using 2 8core mac pro's and a quad core mac pro. The problem applies to pretty much every scene i work on in vray, even pretty basic scenes with just a few shapes and hdri vray dome lights, etc.

I have researched for about 4 months on/off into optimising renders. The render settings/ speed i'm happy with. I just leave it overnight and it looks great. It's just the day to day workflow- tweaking lights, shaders and settings, which i'm having problems with.

Yesterday i persisted with RT and i must say it shows the potential to be amazingly useful. If you keep trying- restarting IPR a few times, wiggling a few settings (eg distributed rendering on/off) it's great. However on my set up it works about 70% of the time. Regularly i get the 'warning:scene is empty' or ' (****) no image writer specified ' or 'host (**** not responding)' and then it works, then it doesn't, then a black screen. I'm loathed to start a long project with this kind of instability.

I've set up distributed rendering and it seems to A) slow down renders (?) and b) cause renders to hang without error messages + c) taking up WAY too much of my time. I'd love to use the benefits of this but OSX seems to always lose out to windows with ease of DR use (same goes for mental ray satellite). For example, why can't the DR manager find available CPU's?

I'll definitely try the tiled exr's thing- i guess my hdri env maps are the only huge files i'm using so they must be affecting things. Maybe this could be the root of my problems? I'll look into it.

One thing i'm interested in is the network speed. Could i be seeing some kind of licensing issue with client/slave? If so that's really annoying. I must admit things have started to really slow down once i started to mess with DR.

As for the mac/pc thing. Yes i'm v afraid of the mac /pc network scenario. Texture maps, file paths, etc. I agree- I don't want to be managing networks, i want to be creating images! However if vray runs stable, and fast, on an hp z820 i'd happily buy one just to get out of this rut!! The mac 12 cores are much cheaper now, so that is an option, but if vray runs faster on a PC then i'm happy to jump ship...

[snivlem]

Ah ok. If it helps:

I like to use the Nederhurst settings for final renders with brute force as primary and very low light cache as secondary making sure retrace threshold is disabled then sampling of 1-100.

This way I can fire off extremely quick drafts that are noise as hell, but I can have all my lights and get an idea of how everything is going.

So I'm basically just globally controlling V-Ray via three attributes AA/Noise threshold, Adaptive Amount and Global Subdivs.

Maybe if you putt noise threshold at like 1, Adaptive amount at 1 (or close too), then lower the global subdivs and use brute force it could actually be quick rendering? (Brute force as opposed to irradiance mapping as I find it too slow and messy for drafts, but that's just me)

[Bertjenkins]

Cool thanks...

Yup i've tried the Nederhurst settings too, it is handy to bring it all down to three settings. I haven't tried doing drastic reductions though, i'll give it a go.

I've actually had the best results so far using light cache as primary and secondary... no particular logic to it but on my current project it's way faster and less noisy. Also I've found you get a pretty good idea of what's going on from the prepasses. But on a 1920x1080 render i'd rather get the optimum settings and tweak with RT, that would be my preferred scenario, if i could just get it a bit more stable!

[t.petrov]

Yesterday i persisted with RT and i must say it shows the potential to be amazingly useful. If you keep trying- restarting IPR a few times, wiggling a few settings (eg distributed rendering on/off) it's great. However on my set up it works about 70% of the time.

Regularly i get the 'warning:scene is empty' or ' (****) no image writer specified ' or 'host (**** not responding)' and then it works, then it doesn't, then a black screen. I'm loathed to start a long project with this kind of instability.

The first and the second are not real issues.
Only the last is an issue ('host ... not responding'). This means that the V-Ray standalone used for RT has crashed, most of the times.
Is it possible to isolate it to a particular scene or this problem happens at random with all scenes?

Also what V-Ray and Maya versions are you using?

/Teodor

[Bertjenkins]

I'm using 2.20.01 (snow leapord) and maya 2012. Vray core version 2.00.01

I've never had RT running completely smoothly. I'm now having a problem with relatively simple scenes hanging on renders. I changed my network settings to try and get DR up and running and this seems to have caused some other problems.

[vlado]

We also did quite a few fixes for the nightly builds (and the stable builds on the nightly builds server), so it may make sense to look into them.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Bertjenkins]

hi how do i access nightly builds?

thanks

[vlado]

You can email us to vraymaya@chaosgroup.com and our support guys will sort it out. If you still have issues, please email me directly to vlado@chaosgroup.com

Best regards,
Vlado

[Bertjenkins]

Hi Guys

Just an update on my progress, in case there's any other OSX users out there. I've installed the latest snow leapord nightly build and have already seen a big improvement. I believe the issues i was having were with a) rendering regions and b) using nurbs elements in IPR - both of which appear to have been fixed. However it might have been other things.

The RT seems much more stable, I'm using the gpu and so far it's great (shame it can't do viewport subdivision as i use subd preview quite a bit, but lets not get greedy). It seems to be really transforming my workflow so far. Fingers crossed...

Also I don't know why but i'm seeing a vast improvement in the distributed rendering. Suddenly it works. All 3 machines going, my render times have gone down from 2.48 per frame to 1.06. I have upgraded my network set up so that it's much faster, and also i'm using light cache for my GI, which seems to make a difference - i guess because you can use 1 thread per pass, so you can share it accross all machines?

It's a shame I have to set the render slaves manually in the terminal. It just won't recognise them when i register them as slaves on installation. I have to go back and make ammendments to the setvrlservice, then it works. I really don't like having to do this as I'm no programmer- so every time something goes wrong i have to get the manual out (which is not very strightforward at the best of times) and go through the steps for setting the ip address and port. That's my main issue so far with DR. I guess what would be really handy would be a seperate Client installer and a seperate Slave installer... ie, you just double click to install client on the dongle machine and slave on all other machines and everything is set up and ready to go.


Although the fact that it actually works is really exciting!!!!

[vlado]

It's a shame I have to set the render slaves manually in the terminal. It just won't recognise them when i register them as slaves on installation. I have to go back and make ammendments to the setvrlservice, then it works.

Can you explain a bit more what additional set up is necessary? Ideally we would also like to make this as fluid an experience as possible.

Other than that, good to hear that things work better now

Best regards,
Vlado

[Bertjenkins]

Just realised my reply never showed up. My issues are really with the general user operability of vray installations in osx. The unix executable files are a bit clunky. For vrayslave, for example, these files don't seem to be able to run from startup like other osx apps. So you have to manually go into the bin folder and run them.

It would be great if you could have an easy way to set up vrayslaves on each machine without having to type any code. ie you click an installer icon and it installs, and you hey presto have an app which you can put in the start up items for vray slave, like the vrlservice.

Also it would be great if you could have a browse feature in the distributed rendering dialogue. ie it searches for available slaves. For someone like me it takes me an afternoon to find out what my computer's IP address is!