Very Long Load Time for Animation

[Gray_Parrot]

Hi, I really appreciate your help with this in advance. I've learned so much from the forum and so far have not become stuck.

I have a scene that I am trying to animate via the modo plugin and it is taking over 2.5 minutes to load. The same still image with all settings the same takes under 30 seconds.

I'm running 901 on two Titan Zs. My scene is around 3 Million Polygons and I have about 1.6 gigs used of my 6.1 gigs of vram. My scene, which contains many reflective metal objects, takes about 5 minutes per frame to render via path tracing set to 2600 samples. The extra 2.5 minutes of load time brings the total render time up to a surprising 7.5 minutes.

Thank you for reading this!

GP

[face_off]

Hi GP.

What you load and render a single frame, there are some differences to the way the Mesh nodes are organised in Octane. From https://docs.otoy.com/Modo/?page_id=998

IMPORTANT: When rendering animations, ALL Meshes will be treated as having Live Geometry Update TICKED. This means that a) the Samples per Second may be slightly lower when rendering animations compared with rendering a single frame. And b) because each Mesh item will have it’s own Octane Mesh node (because it is Live), the Local Space coordinates may be different to when rendering a single frame (where the Meh is not Live, so has a base transform at the origin of the scene) – so you may see Octane procedural textures render differently in this situation. If 2) is causing an issue, making all Modo Meshes Live (ie. tick Live Geometry Update) will resolve this issue.

So it you have all meshes live, does the scene still load as a single frame in 30 secs, or does it blow out to 2.5 mins? If it's 2.5mins, then you must have many many many small meshes, which is taking Octane a long time to process individually.

If you enable the preferences->Render Cache, then the load time is much quicker between frames, because Modo will only update meshes that have changed. However the Render Cache API does not currently support some features, such as multiple UV maps, so it may or may not be suitable in your situation.

Paul

[Gray_Parrot]

Hi Paul, Wow, thanks for the quick and informative reply! I'll do as you suggest and report back.

[Gray_Parrot]

Hi Paul, by "If you enable the preferences->Render Cache" is that the same as

System>Preferences>Octane>Use Modo Render Cache?

Or is there another Preferences panel? You are talking about the Preferences in the Modo drop down menu, right?

Sorry for the confusion,

GP

[face_off]

Yes, they are the same. Pls see https://docs.otoy.com/Modo/?page_id=1113 for Render Cache details.

Paul

[Gray_Parrot]

Thanks for the links Paul. I've had no luck (so far) by turning on and off the modo render cache.

However, the "load all frames" has made a huge improvement. Reading the Octane Manual, I did notice the warning about the animated camera properties not working with this setting. Will a simple camera movement work OK however? Most of my sequences are camera pans over and around a watch mechanism (which is mostly itself not animated because it has been taken apart). So you were also correct in assuming that there are many small meshes.

I really appreciate you taking the time to help me. And I have marveled at the excellent job you've done with the plugin!

[face_off]

Will a simple camera movement work OK however?

Yes - camera position, target, up, fov and focal depth should all load into the Octane Camera animation buffer. If you need other camera pins animated, let me know and I'll see if the .abc format allows for it.

Paul

[Gray_Parrot]

Wonderful, this solved my problem Paul. Thank you!