"Render Animation" long update times between Frames Tweet

[Silverwing]

Hey there.
I come from Cinema 4D and lately also work with Blender.
In the last couple of weeks I have set up a blender Octane Scene.

Everything went quite well until I wanted to do the first animation test renderings.
When I have the "Viewport Shading" / Live rendering running Octane takes about 10 to 15 Sec to switch between frames (Until it updated)
In that time the status reads "Updating Shaders"

When I hit "Render Animation" Blender loads the scene and sends it to the server, then renders the frame.
After that it seems like it does not update the scene but renders the next frame completely from scratch. It takes about 2 minutes in between frames until the next frame renders. The rendering of the actual frame then only takes 10 seconds.

I have a couple of rather complex materials in the scene that use triplanar mapping as well as color attributes from the objects.
Also some image sequences as screen textures.

I know from C4D that the initial frame can take quite long to load on more complex scenes but then I would expect something along the lines I am getting in the "Viewport Shading" / Live rendering with only 10-15 seconds update time in between frames.

I have left the meshes to "Scatter / Movable" and the render server as "As Is"
Is there any other setting I can try to get fast animation renders?

Some Details:
When loading the scene, no matter if "Viewport Shading" / Live rendering, while preparing the RAM of the machine goes from 18GB (this is how much the scene uses up in Blender on it´s own without rendering. The computer Idle was around 12GB of Ram Usage) to about 30GB then comes down to around 19 GB when it starts rendering.
Moving around objects, jumping between frames ect. does not cause a full reload only the object that was touched is quickly updated.

When rendering the whole animation with "Render Animation" Octane goes through this low to high to low Ram usage cycle every frame.
While this it´s showing "Render Target Evaluation on Server" and most of the time "Waiting for Image"

I will gladly provide the scene to the developer for testing. If you are interested, please DM me or give me an email address where I can send a google drive link with the packed blender file.

Cheers, thanks in advance and Happy Holidays to all of you!
Raphael

[linograndiotoy]

It looks like the addon version is showing this issue. The developers are investigating.

I've noticed that some time ago while rendering a scene.

Solving that in the addon version is not trivial.

[Silverwing]

Oh, that was a very fast answer thank you!

Actually this is not the addon version but the "OctaneRender™ for Blender 2023.1.1 - 28.6 [STABLE]"
If you say that this is occuring in the addon version. Maybe there is hope that this might be fixable in the Blender Octane built?

Cheers and thank you for your fast answer!

[linograndiotoy]

You're welcome!

Actually I'm not experiencing any slow down in the custom build version.

It would be great if you could share a scene showing it.

Thanks!

[Silverwing]

Oh nice.

as I said above. I will gladly do. I will DM you with the DL link for the scene!

[linograndiotoy]

My feeling is that using Out of Core could really slow down the render in this specific case.

What about the OLS projection nodes you're using in this scene? I wonder if those can also be the cause of the slow down.

[Silverwing]

My feeling is that using Out of Core could really slow down the render in this specific case.

What about the OLS projection nodes you're using in this scene? I wonder if those can also be the cause of the slow down.

Thank you very much for having a look.
I am actually not going out of core on my system.
Also if you only enable a couple of panels it´s the same behavior (So there is less memory used, less load on the system). It prepares, then renders one frame, then starts preparing again.

The OSL Scripts I wrote are there to offset the dirt / grunge patterns for all the render instances. So you get a different look for the small objects and don´t have the same dirt pattern on every knob for example.

Yesterday I did some research and deleted the OSL scripts as well as the Color Attributs of the shader. But unfortunately no luck there.
Right now I am a bit out of ideas what can cause it. Maybe triplanar?

As I mentioned briefly yesterday. I come from C4D. And basically use the same technique there (with Vertex Maps and OSL Scripts). So I was surprised to find those long reload times between frames with Blender.

Maybe you can have a deeper look at the file and find the culprit that makes it take so long to update.
Cheers and thanks for your ongoing Development.

P.s. yesterday I tried the addon too. So I converted the scene from Blender Octane to Blende 4 with addon. (Exported it with Octane Blender)
The "Viewport Shading" / Live rendering felt more snappy to be honest. I could scrub though the animation with barely any lag. Though export was the same.
The Color Vertex Attributes seem not to work there also.
I could get it to work in the "Viewport Shading" / Live rendering by going to the different meshes and clicking on the "Convex" and Concave" attributes. This seems to make them load into the shader.

Unfortunately it resets after restarting the render or rendering out a final animation. So it renders without Vertex Attributes.
Of course the same problem presists in the addon version (as you mentioned before) About 2 min preperation time for each frame.

I would be so super thankful if this could somehow be avoided and the renderer would only update the delta between the frames (like it does in "Viewport Shading" / Live rendering)
I think this would be a huge step forward in Usability!

Lastly I also tried exporting the scene as ORBX.
But also no luck there. Once started there is progress. But when it reaches 100% Nothing shows up in the save location.

Cheers and again thanks for all your effort!

[Andreas_Resch]

Great to see you dabble into Blender as well, Raphael

Maybe this is linked to the issue that compiling scenes takes incredibly long compared to V27.16. The scenes are compiled every times I start the preview or final rendering. In a direct comparison V28.x take 8 times longer than 27.16 (32s compares to 4s). This is one of the bigger issues right now. Interestingly enough I also use OSL scripts and Triplanar mapping a lot. But the differences already occur in the simplest of scenes with standard materials.

I also hope there is a fix soon.

[Silverwing]

Great to see you dabble into Blender as well, Raphael

Maybe this is linked to the issue that compiling scenes takes incredibly long compared to V27.16. The scenes are compiled every times I start the preview or final rendering. In a direct comparison V28.x take 8 times longer than 27.16 (32s compares to 4s). This is one of the bigger issues right now. Interestingly enough I also use OSL scripts and Triplanar mapping a lot. But the differences already occur in the simplest of scenes with standard materials.

I also hope there is a fix soon.

Hey Andreas,

what a joy seeing you here!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. That´s a really interesting observation!
Not sure if the Octane Version is backwards compatible. But I might now install V27.16 and give it a try. If the export times is indeed 8 times faster there, then it actually might be bearable. 15sec between frames instead of 2 min sounds OK!
I will try that now and report back!

[Andreas_Resch]

You might encounter various compatibility issues - especially in the materials. There were some node changes in V28.x and I don't think they can be interpreted correctly in 27.X. But I'm curious to see what your findings are.