I've finally managed to upgrad to 4 GPUs, 2x1080 and 2x980ti, and what should I say: Render times make me happy!
But there's a downer ... I'm rendering animation very often and my current project invorlves a lot of mechanical moving parts from CAD, which even WITH Octane-Tags make the export/prepare/save time pretty slow from frame to frame. Usually the actual render takes 14 seconds for a full hd image (yeah!), but about 20 seconds are the used for "saving frame, update, prepare, start rendering", which brings me to about 34 seconds. And since I've got two 8-core processors and 128gb ram, I'm sure the bottleneck must be either the hdd or - no offense - that Octane can't handle processing the frame while rendering the next. Especially on multiple cards it would be great if there was some management for that (rendering parallel frames on different cards maybe?).
I've searched the forums and found out about the blender plugin, which seems to have an option to switch on/off export-components and as you can read here viewtopic.php?f=32&t=14149 the export times geat critically faster when leaving out normals from export. Is there a similar option in Cinema 4D I don't know of?
Thank you and regards
Phil
EDIT:
I found a way to significantly reduce my preparation time. Now it does not take 20 seconds per frame to start rendering, but 6 seconds. And I don't know if it is a new info, but the solution was not assigning materials to the mother nulls, but the objects themselves or small groups of objects. Since most of my objects have the same material, I used a parented null with my material on it and changed only some of the children's material if needed. And it seems that Octane hates that. I post a picture in the comments!
so if is any better feeling to you knowing that's not just Cinema4D issue but Octane in general.
