SLOW / Not Responsive Integration ? Tweet

[doca]

Hi guys,

I always get optimistic in starting a project in Octane for Houdini and in the beginning things are simple and go well.
Bu as soon as scene gets to be a bit production ready everything it get's very, very slow and non responsive and I always end up transferring it to Octane Standalone which still isn't a perfect solution for animation projects but it is at least not so frustrating as playing with Octane inside the Houdini.

I'm crying out here to see weather somebody else shares similar experience and hoping I am doing something wrong.

I did things like low priority and no logging which sometimes does help.

I'm on Win7 x64, Houdini 19.0.657, Octane 2021.1.5.0, GTX 3080Ti
Same happens on win10 x64.

Please shed some light, it would be awesome to be able to use this Houdini plugin in production in our house!

Thanks!

[fantome]

I think it will be really hard to help without proper user case.
i would create review scenes from your production scenes where you encounter the problem.
The houdini version and the standalone version.
Then share them directly by PM to otoy/juanjo for precise investigation.

it might actually be a bug or a real issues in the latest version of the houdini plugin.
but i must confess that octane has a certain limit in term of complexity it can handle. when thing are really really heavy i prefer use Arnold.
Cheers
E

[doca]

Sometimes I just can't move a light in the viewport while it is rendering, and it takes sometime, and all of a sudden at some point it starts working normally.
It is hard to reproduce the issue.

[doca]

Ok,

We have some fast moving jackets in shots and motion blur kills the scene, it gets extremely slow, CPU jumps up on 100% and often scene crashes.

Maybe I could supply you guys with some repro scene for check-out?

Cheers.
Ivan

[fantome]

are you sure you @v vector is not with completely crazy values ? does the scale of your scenes are corrects ? 1m in houdini = 1m in real life ?
if you set a wrangle with

Code: Select all

v@*= 0.01;

then try to augment the value 0.01 t to 0.1 does it speed up rendertime ?

again, you should create a 101 scene that describe your problem and PM it to juanjo/otoy.
that's the only way if you have things that work perfectly in standalone and not working in houdini.

the IPR with floating panel tend to be very crashy when you are too ambitious with interactive edit of your scene. i always push pause / unpause in houdini or maya viewport to reduce the number of crash.

[Terryvfx]

I've been doing extensive testing and at least I can point out to a few things that slow IPR responsiveness

1 - Using RAW geo instead of any kind of instancing: This one should be pretty obvious so I'm pretty sure it doesn't happen to a lot of users but yeah remember to at least instance packed geo in the object settings.

2 - Using packed geo instead of traditional instancing: I know is a bit of a pain to use the Instance object (I myself hate it) but Octane really loves traditional instances the IPR performance is amazing.

3 - Instead of using the instance object is just plain better to use point instancing because it takes all the same attributes that the copy to points node does so is a no-brainer the only cumbersome part is pointing to object level objects with a string point attribute.

The render performance is the same (at least in my testing so far) between packed geo and traditional instancing so the only gain is IPR performance meaning if you are working on some sort of Motion Design project this would be a good example were going through the additional setup would be worth it.

Lastly don't forget to cache absolutely everything. You want to make it as easier to the renderer as possible so just having a File Cache then a Material node and finally an Out null node is a good setup to ensure performance and stability plus having the material after Cache lets you change it without having to recache whatever you did again.

[juanjgon]

Can you please share an example scene with these performance problems? I can try to find the bottlenecks on the plugin side, if the slowdown comes from the scene extraction code, or report any performance issue to the core devs if the delay comes from the core, in the pre-processing stage.

Anyway, in the end the problem can be that the scene becomes too complex to fit in the available GPU RAM, forcing Octane to run out of core, making the rendering process slower. It is hard to say what could be the problem without more information, so any example scene could help to improve the plugin/Octane performance.

Thanks,
-Juanjo