I have a problem with something I have noticed for a while now.
Basically, I have a file which has a bunch of simple geometry loaded in. Some of it is animated, but only using simple transforms, and the amount of objects within the scene is relatively low(up to 1000)
The scene also contains several orbx proxies of a piece of machinery which consists of 8 objects, which together amount to 17 million polys. The animation only has 1 animated camera, spread over some 8500 frames.
The problem is this: Octane viewport is smooth, with the animation playing in almost realtime(sub-second geometry re-fresh). So if I set up octane to give me 1 second draft renders, I expect it to take 8500 seconds. However when I press the render button via Max, it loads the scene, renders, and every subsequent frame takes ~6 seconds. That is, 1 second rendering, and 5 seconds while it claims it's rendering, but isn't doing anything.
This problem of the discrepancy between interactive viewport and max's animation rendering has been present over several projects I've had to date, and I have no explanation for it. I feel like I don't even have the tools to properly isolate what's causing the problem. All I've managed to isolate so far is that it is caused by the heavy geometry of the machine. When it is disabled Octane behaves like expected: 1 second renders. When I enable ANY of the heavy parts, it jumps to 6 - 7 seconds. However what's interesting is that it doesn't matter whether I load in 1 or all 8 of the parts, it still takes the same 6 seconds(basically it doesn't matter if the scene contains 4 mln polys or 20). I have tried having the geometry brought in as .octprx proxy file, as well as just linked the geometry, as well as actual geometry. It doesn't matter, even if only one part of that machine is enabled, the time it takes to start rendering a frame is extended by 5 seconds. When I disable everything, and only keep that one piece of heavy geometry, the trend is reversed, and each frame only takes the one second I want it to.
Is there any way I can find out what is it doing during those 5 seconds? Are there any tools I have to see what needs optimized for me to do this? Why is octane realtime viewport not affected? It shows the same animation. Everything in the scene is set as 'movable proxy'. Gosh even an orbx export of the whole animation renders this no problem in standalone.
As this is not the first time this happened, is it possible to have a function built in that allows to have an animation render directly out of the interactive viewport? That would at least give us a guarantee that if a client needs to see a draft we can give it to them within the day.
Also, is there a way to have octane report to me if something is taking too long? Like if a single object is causing a delay of several seconds, or if there are any other delays which make what should be 1 second frame take 10.
Another issue I experience, but only lately, and I don't have a lot of time to investigate, is forest pack. When there ale multiple forest objects within the scene, even when they aren't animated, octane takes a few seconds to re-load the scene when using an animated camera. Even when nothing else in the scene is animated, or anything else enabled other than forest pack, it still causes a geometry re-fresh. This didn't use to be the cause a couple of versions back I think. This also happens in both, the 3ds max native animation render as well as octane viewport.
When I export forest object as orbx, and load it back in, it doesn't have that problem, but the Vram footprint for an orbx loaded back into max with forest data is a lot higher than using forest pack on it's own. Is there a way to fix this? Or at least find out what's causing the problem?
Lastly, can you tell me if there's any way I can revert to an older version of the plugin that doesn't require a re-install? The problem I have currently is that we've installed 2020.2 - 11.5 but I have a scene which we need to render and it contains animated texture transforms for opacity maps, which this particular version has managed to break. To install the new version it would take us to go to IT, and wait for a rather lengthy process for them to update the software for us, since we don't have admin rights(yeah I know.. big company). Is there a way for us to do this manually without requiring admin rights? Even if it's just for reverting to a previous version? For example, octane standalone doesn't delete it's previous versions and we still have access to those.
Many thanks for taking your time to hear my plea. I hope you can resolve at least some of these issues.
Kind regards,
Jani