Character components lagging behind during render Tweet

[khdownes]

Hey, I've been trying to render a shot of a character animation I've been working on, but for some reason every few frames one or more of the bound/skinned meshes lags a frame.
I've attached my first render attempt so you can see, also a screenshot of the character structure in my project.

It seems to only be a problem when I'm rendering with Octane (I've been doing software preview renders all along with the cinema renderer and haven't had the issue until I switched to rendering with octane for the final output).
The only things I can think might possibly be affecting it is the fact that I've got a squash and stretch deformer acting on the mesh, and maybe it's order in the object heirarchy is messing up the mesh calculation at render time.
Could changing the Geometry control from "auto detect" to "all objects movable" in the render settings possibly fix this issue? Or changing the Geometry engine to "resend all scene data (deprecated)"?

Has anyone else had a similar issue, and might know how to fix it?
If it was only one or two frames I'd just deal with it, but because it's basically every 3rd or 4th frame, it would take me hours to have to sit there and manually rerender each of the problem frames.

[ Play Quicktime file ] Kyle_Astronaut_shot_01.mp4 [ 3.38 MiB | Viewed 2204 times ]

[aoktar]

Hard to estimate without testing your scene. But try with "all objects movable" and "deprecated method" alternatively.

[khdownes]

Okay thanks Aoktar, if I get a chance I'll do some fast/low sample rate renders this evening and try those options to see if anything works.
Otherwise I might post the scene file here, for if you or anyone else here feels like poking around to see if they can spot anything wrong.

[aoktar]

Okay thanks Aoktar, if I get a chance I'll do some fast/low sample rate renders this evening and try those options to see if anything works.
Otherwise I might post the scene file here, for if you or anyone else here feels like poking around to see if they can spot anything wrong.

Its cool! Scene will help to debug it if you still have issue.

[khdownes]

Thanks, changing the geometry engine to "Resend All Scene Data (Deprecated)" increases the render time per frame by a fair amount, but seems to have fixed the issues I was having with the bound meshes lagging randomly.

[aoktar]

Thanks, changing the geometry engine to "Resend All Scene Data (Deprecated)" increases the render time per frame by a fair amount, but seems to have fixed the issues I was having with the bound meshes lagging randomly.

Yes as it should be but this option will be removed after sometimes and the method causes resending of all data per frames. So i'd like to check your scene to see what's happening and bring a solution.

[khdownes]

Hey Aoktar, I'm about to PM you a link to the scene file (I can't share it here publicly because it's got some quixel megascan textures in there)

I tried changing a few more things around in the scene and did some more low sample renders, and I think I've figured out what is causing the issue:
I've used the c4d advanced biped character object to rig the astronaut. I then duplicated it for each of the shots in my animation (which is probably bad practice, I don't do much character animation, I was afraid it would get really messy if I tried animating all the shots with the one rig).
Then for each of my shots, I added them to a separate layer, so I could switch them on and off to optimise the scene as I'm working.
I think the problem is that when you use cinema 4Ds character creator, it adds all the separate components to its own layer system. So when I've added the duplicated character rigs to new layers, I've messed something up in the advanced bipeds layer structure.

After doing a few more test renders, it seems that if I turn all the layer switches for the other layers off, except the shot I'm rendering (the left side of the below image), it causes the random bound mesh lags throughout the render.
But if I make sure that all the layer switches are on for the other shots, except visibility and render, I don't get any mesh lags (right side of the below image)

[aoktar]

Thanks for detailed investigation. I'll try to understand the issue on next days.