Blender and VR animation Tweet

[sammie865]

Hello there,

I am using the octane VR demo along with the blender plugin. Latest versions of both and I am trying to render an animation.

now the rendering seems to be going ok but the actual transfer of frames to octane is taking longer than the actual render.

So for example, I hit render animation in blender. it takes 2 mins for the render to actually stat, it says updating shaders the whole time, then the render of the actual frame starts and is complete in about 10 seconds, then the loading of the next frame starts. it once again says updating shader for 2 mins.

Is there a way to speed this up or optimize this part? am I missing a setting somewhere?
This animation has 150 frames and could be done in 30 minutes, but its taking over 4 hrs because most of the time is not spent rendering but sending stuff to octane.

So am I missing a setting somewhere?
I mean the shaders never change, nor does the geometry of the mesh, its just its position in space that changes. So why is it taking so long to send the scenes to octane? I thought octane could handle things like this realtime?

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

Sammie

[grimm]

You need to make sure that you have the mesh type set correctly in the object data tab. Try setting it to "movable proxy" for the objects that are moving, or "scatter" for instanced objects. That should speed things up.

[sammie865]

I have tried that, and the settings make no difference., My scene is a single object, with the octane environment set and nothing else. a single object with 22,881 verts. moving in free space.
I have tried every single override option as well as setting the mesh itself as moveable proxy.

The synchronizing objects only comes up for about 1 second, then it says updating shader the rest of the time.
Wierd thing is, the first frame starts to render after about 10 seconds, .5 seconds to snyc objects, and about 9 seconds to update shader, but each frame after that takes over 2 mins to update the shaders. No change in GPU vram load, so it doesent appear to be resending the textures. there are 21 materials on the mesh, all specular. 10 textures.

so whats causing the shader update to take so long? and why does it take longer on each subsequent frame?

EDIT: I have just tried using the alembic export instead of render, thinking that the animation might render better in octane standalone. But there seems to be the same problem here. I have set an overide on the render layer removing all the materials per say. just a white diffuse shader, and its still taking forever, firt frame is done in 6 seconds, the remaining frames each take 2mins. says updating shaders the entire time. even tough there are no shaders or materials present per say.

Also, if I decide to run the render in octane standalone, is there a way for to transfer the materials from blender to octane? I dont want to have to recreate each material from scratch in octane. I spent a good amount of time setting them up in blender. Basically, is there a way for blender to save the materials to the local octane db?

[grimm]

Hmm, make sure to set the global mesh type to "as is" in the render tab, if you have it set to "global" I think you can see these issues. I don't know of a way to move the materials over to standalone. Alembic doesn't support materials, so if I was using standalone with an animation I just created the materials there.

[grimm]

Just thought of another issue that might affect this. What version of the demo are you using? I know in an earlier version that the mesh type stuff was broken.

[sammie865]

i had the gobal override set to as is for all of the test, then I tried using the actual overrides. None of the settings ever made a difference.
When I change the viewport in blender to rendered, there are no problems, the image comes up alsmot immediately, I can even play the animation and it runs ok, no pauseing between frames.

When I load the alembic in standalone, which took over 2hrs to create btw, it doesent play smoothly. when I go from one frame to the next it takes around 8 seconds for it to actually update and show the next frame. Isnt it supposed to be able to scroll through the frames in real time?

Using blender 2.73
octane VR 2.23.1
Octane server ?? cant look it up, whatever version came with octane VR

EDIT: just upgraded all to the latest versions, no change
Blender VR edition 8.5(2.74)
VR server 2.23.2 -8.5
VR standalone 2.23.2

[JimStar]

sammie865
Could you please share the scene?
BTW - there is already newer version of BlenderVR plugin available in the download area.

[sammie865]

Here is one of the scenes. Its rather large as I have included the textures. 70.6MB

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/886 ... st%202.rar

[pegot]

FYI as of current version of Blender Octane there is no way of transferring scenes with materials (via ORBX ?) to Standalone. Other than the Alembic export (which is a really great added extra feature) Blender Octane has no way of communicating with Octane Standalone which I think some of the other plug-ins can do. Would be really useful and I am sure very welcomed by the Blender Octane community if developer could add such functionality.

[sammie865]

Anyone have any ideas to speed this up? or what going on?

Hello Octane support, Any opinions about this?

Another thing I have noticed, when rendering in the viewport, It updates the shaders in about 5 seconds, and uses all 8 cores of the CPU, when I hit render, It only uses 1 core.