How can I reduce update time between animation frames

[dearthman]

HI there. I apologize if this has been talked about before, it's kind of hard to search for.

I've been working on a project with fairly simple scenes of one or two animated objects at most, but I'm getting very long update times between frames. Some of the polygon counts are high, and what I'm calling an "object" might be a null with a number of things in it, but they are all moving together, and there is no deformation or animated materials or anything. If I understand Octane correctly there should not be much updating that has to go on between frames once the scene is initially prepared for rendering and non-deforming geometry is loaded, right? Yet there's a scene I'm rendering now where the actual render time is about 15 seconds, but there is a 45 second "start rendering" time before every single frame, which is a killer on minutes-long shots!

I'm not complaining necessarily, I'd just like to know what things I should be looking for that cause this so that I can avoid them and reduce that time.

Here is an example frame from the octane log:

FRAME 3868 fps:30
MB:0/0 ST/MOV:0/68 Nodes:359 Tris:4.492m DispTris:0 Hairs:0 Meshes:400
VRAM used/free/max:1.24Gb/8.443Gb/12Gb Out-of-core used:0Kb total used RAM:29.011Gb
MotBlurTM=0 sec. createTM=0.873 sec. matTM=0 sec. updateTM=40.785 sec.
Device:0 TotMem:12Gb rtData:524Mb film:14Mb geo:694Mb node:10Kb tex:36Mb unavailable:2.318Gb temperature:65
Device:1 TotMem:12Gb rtData:524Mb film:14Mb geo:694Mb node:10Kb tex:36Mb unavailable:2.058Gb temperature:57
Device:2 TotMem:12Gb rtData:524Mb film:14Mb geo:694Mb node:10Kb tex:36Mb unavailable:2.058Gb temperature:56
Device:3 TotMem:12Gb rtData:524Mb film:14Mb geo:694Mb node:10Kb tex:36Mb unavailable:2.058Gb temperature:48
renderTM:16.955ms. totalTM:58.613ms.

You can see the render time is 17 seconds, and update time is 40 seconds for some reason even though this is not the first frame. I tried messing around with the geometry control and object tag settings, they don't seem to make a difference in this case. I'm running Windows 10, Cinema R18 and 4x Titan Pascals, this has happens on 3.06 and the 3.07 test version I just started trying out today.

Thanks for any help!

[bepeg4d]

Hi dearthman,
please, share the scene with me via PM.
ciao beppe