biggest Octane scene preparation slowdown culprits

[mitchino]

I run Octane on a mac using 1 x 1080ti for Octane and 1 x 980ti for the system and monitor.

I have no problem with the actual render speed, could always be better but it's fine for me.

I am though having a lot of problems with the time Octane takes to prepare the scene for rendering, I see the spinning beachball a LOT, and I want to speed things up. I can see Octane getting stuck on some textures and when loading geometry.

So what are the biggest slowdown culprits when preparing a scene?

I like to use c4d's noises at 2K res for bumps etc - I suspect they are really bad? I also use HDR Light Studio - can that cause problems? I render a lot of glass with textures for roughness, bump, normal and displacement, that's probably bad.

What are the best things to avoid? And what's the best way of speeding up the scene prep? A more powerful CPU?

[aoktar]

Open Console window and see export times. You can easily detect where it spend time.
Worst idea is to use C4D shaders(automatically baking to images), go with Octane shaders. It takes a lot of preparation time. Also use V4 for faster geometry processing.

[mitchino]

I am using V4.

Are image maps faster than baked c4d shaders?

Do you think it will ever be possible to support the native c4d noises without baking? Or do you think you might be able to expand the number of native Octane noises?

[aoktar]

Are image maps faster than baked c4d shaders?

Images are having loading time. Depends to size and format. C4D shader are pre-rendered as images and used as image. This has pre-render time and takes much time for big sizes. Take your some time to compare both.
You can write noises in OSL.

[mitchino]

Don't think I'm capable of writing anything!

[aoktar]

Don't think I'm capable of writing anything!

You don't have to do. But we have an option for that.