"Processing Geometry" - any way to minimise this for animation?

[thenomad]

Hiya, and thanks in advance for any help!

I'm currently testing Octane for a slightly unusual use-case: I'm looking to produce rendered clips at about .5 sec per frame of animation. Quality doesn't have to be great, but it has to be fast.

So far, I've had good results with static geometry - with a MaxSamples of 20, DirectLight/Ambient Occlusion and a frame size of half 720p, render times are around half a second, maybe a bit lower.

However, using MAX, as soon as I add an animated character things slow down massively. The "Processing Geometry" stage of each frame takes about 3-6 seconds, blowing my time budget completely!

I'm wondering if there's any way round this that anyone knows? I know Octane 1.5 Standalone is meant to support Alembic, so that would presumably solve this problem - but before then, is there a way to configure MAX to minimise this problem? Another package that doesn't suffer from geometry processing times? Something else I haven't thought of?

All tips and suggestions gratefully received!

[suvakas]

Set your character to Octane proxy and see if it helps.
I always use proxies when I do animations. Makes export times faster, but rendering a bit slower.

Suv

[thenomad]

Thanks!

How do I set an Octane Proxy in Max? I've looked through all the docs, but can't find anything about it.

[suvakas]

I don't remember exactly, but right click on your model and look for "Octane proxy" or "Octane properties" or smth like that.
Don't have Max here atm.

Suv

[thenomad]

That helps a lot, thanks!

Render times on my test scene are down to 2.7 sec/frame for 1280x720. That's still higher than render times without any animation (about 1.8s/frame) but a lot better.

I take it the proxies introduce additional load on the renderer? Is that load which a more powerful graphics card would reduce, or is the .7s (approx) additional delay per frame just a fixed cost, does anyone know?

[FooZe]

I'd say the slow down will be scene preparation (possibly even on the 3ds max side rather than octane). I think if you want to decrease this time you will need to increase CPU and main RAM speed.

[gordonrobb]

In the LW plugin, if you click on the render target node, there is a setting to stop the full rebuild between frames. Do you have that?

[thenomad]

@gordonrobb - I don't think we have that in the MAX version, although I could be wrong.

@FooZe - Do you have any suggestions for how to minimise scene preparation in terms of how the scene's designed? Materials to use or avoid, tickyboxes to check, things to hide, etc?

[FooZe]

Hi, Nope, no more suggestions other than what has been mentioned already. ie: proxies.
Objects that are marked as proxies will only have their transforms updated rather than the entire mesh re-compiled.
Other than that decreasing poly count is about all you can do.

Thanks
Chris.