rendertime vs. updating/writing Tweet

[rustyippolito]

How can we optimize our setup so that our render times are actually what Octane is reporting? The "UPDATING SCENE IN GPUs..." portion of our render takes the same amount of time as it takes to render a frame, so 3 minutes of reported render time actually equates to 6 minutes passing between written frames on disk (and this is all local files on a local machine). This ratio seems to increase with longer render times and/or more render passes. Please let us know how we can optimize our files to reduce the update times or otherwise eliminate some of this lost time.

ps- still running lw 2015.3 / octane 3.07 (can't update til after we deliver this film!)

[juanjgon]

I'm afraid that currently, it is not easy to optimize the "updating GPUs" time. This is the time spent by the Octane core to build all the internal data and acceleration structures to pass the final scene to the GPUs.

One thing that you can try to optimize the CPU utilization if your system has several GPUs and enough CPU RAM is to run several LightWave instances assigned to one or two GPU. With this configuration, you can render the same scene, assigning a frame range for each one, to optimize the CPU usage.

For example, if you are rendering a 1000 frames sequence and you have four GPUs, you could launch two Layouts, configuring two of the GPUs for each Layout, and rendering the frames 1-500 in one, and the 501-1000 in the other one.

You could also use the frame interval to optimize even more the rendering if the render times are not the same along the sequence frames. In our example, you could render in one Layout the frames 1 to 1000 with a frame step 2, and in the other Layout the frames 2 to 1000, also with a frame step 2, so one Layout is going to render the frames 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. and the other one the frames 2 , 4, 6, 8, etc.

Hope this helps,
-Juanjo

[3dreamstudios]

Also if you don't need "Update Materials" on for any reason that can change the load time quite a bit. Unless I'm using an animated texture or Sequence file I turn this off. An if you do need animated textures you can use the Object Properties to add an octane property to only load that objects materials/update and that can help quite a bit too.

Good luck!