Page 1 of 4

Real Long Render Times

PostPosted: Sat May 18, 2013 12:13 am
by morphious2013
I just bought the stand alone with the Poser plugin. I have a GTX 650 Ti card with 2gb ram, and the render time is so much longer than I thought it would be. I sold my render farm thinking Octane Render would render animations really fast. Just a single frame take 30 minutes to loose the grainy look at about 1100 samples. The scene has 2 figures and a grass texture, and a few trees with a 2d back ground on a single plane. I used a IBL Sun Right setting in Poser. I tried the python scripts to compress the textures also.

The Cuda driver is a version 3.xx

Re: Real Long Render Times

PostPosted: Sat May 18, 2013 3:27 am
by face_off
Hi

Selling an entire render farm and replacing it with a low-end $200 graphics card is a big ask. A Titan is somewhere around 7 times quicker than a GTX 650 Ti - so if you are rendering big animations, you need to look at getting more firepower.

From a plugin settings point of view, it's a little hard to make suggestions without seeing a sample frame which is grainy. But in summary.....

1) Set caustic_blur to 1.
2) Set hotpixel_removal to 0
3) "IBL sunlight" is not possible in Octane - it is either IBL /or/ daylight lighting. Daylight seems very very fast. Not as fast, but will depend on the image map you are using.
4) Using a single plane for a background goes against the "Octane way" a bit. IMO you are better off using the IBL as the background (adjust the Poser camera focal length to get the size right). If you have a background plane, it will be cutting off the light from the IBL image, so the final render quality will be compromised.
5) See if "direct lighting" gives you a high enough quality render for your needs - it is many times faster than PMC/PT
6) You can increase the amount of scene lighting (by increasing the daylight or IBL power), which will remove the graininess quicker, and then "imager"->"exposure" and "gamma" to bring the image back to the light levels you need.
7) Under "kernel" you can reduce the "maxdepth" quite a lot, and then adjust the "gamma" to compensate. A "maxdepth" of 6 will render faster than the default 16.
8) Are you using an SSS skin shader? If see, probably not needed for animation - use the standard skin shader the plugin converts skin materials to.
9) If you have any light going through (specular) glass, that will slow the render down, and there are tricks you can use to speed up that situation.

Hope that helps.

Paul

Re: Real Long Render Times

PostPosted: Sat May 18, 2013 12:52 pm
by morphious2013
Thanks for your help, but where are these settings you are referring to? Sorry, I'm a nube.

Re: Real Long Render Times

PostPosted: Sat May 18, 2013 1:04 pm
by face_off
The manual explains this far better than I can. It is in the installer zip file. Let me know if you have any questions after reading it.

Paul

Re: Real Long Render Times

PostPosted: Sat May 18, 2013 7:42 pm
by morphious2013
Yep, direct Light did the trick. Much faster, and great quality. BUT....... Now I am rendering a 650 frame animation. Set to 120 sec per frame render time. After 2 frames it stops rendering. The first time it happened got an error message that GPU has stopped responding. Started it again, and after 2 frames just stopped, as if I has paused it. Could not access the reset button for the card. Had to csncel render, close Octane render window, and restart the Octane render. I am using the latest plugin, 1.13 test release. Is it a bug or is something else going on? Thanks.

Morph

Re: Real Long Render Times

PostPosted: Sat May 18, 2013 9:54 pm
by face_off
Hi Morph

This has been reported before, and appears to be a card hardware fault. Slightly underclocking your video card generally resolves the issue. There will be a card utility on the CD that came with your card - just drop the clock speeds a notch or two.

Also, after this error happens you will most likely need to restart Poser in order to ensure all buffers etc have been reset correctly (Resetting the card seems insufficient in this case).

You can check you Poser temp folder and there will be a cuda.log file which will give more details. You can also click the "Show Log Button" in the "Cuda Devices" tab. Can you post either log pls? It might give me a better insight into what is happening.

Also, can you post a screenshot of your plugin Animation tab settings pls.

Paul

Re: Real Long Render Times

PostPosted: Sat May 18, 2013 10:04 pm
by morphious2013
Thanks. What is a "notch or two ?" LOL. Couple of meghz? Never done that. I restarted Poser, and am rendering again. I will send screen shots of log and animation tab if it happens again. Thanks for your help. I GREATLY appreciate it.

Re: Real Long Render Times

PostPosted: Sat May 18, 2013 10:56 pm
by morphious2013
Here is the animation tab. Could not find cuda log.

Re: Real Long Render Times

PostPosted: Sun May 19, 2013 12:16 am
by morphious2013
My card comes with OC Guru II, but in the interface, it shows the clock speed as 0 and I can't change it. Is there another utility or is this card not capable of underclocking? On the box, it does say it is the OC version. I emailed nVidia and told them i need instructions on doing this procedure but have not heard back from them. Any other ideas? Thanks.

Morph.

Re: Real Long Render Times

PostPosted: Sun May 19, 2013 12:17 am
by morphious2013
Here is a screenshot of the interface