Page 1 of 2

Export speed

Posted: Tue Jun 29, 2010 1:31 am
by kivig
Hi,
Blender's export takes time. Sometimes a minute or more. Makes testing heavier scene animation a headache.
Is it Python's bottleneck? Are there any chances to see improvements someday? Or maybe there are possibilities not to reload everything each frame?
Thanks!

Re: Export speed

Posted: Tue Jun 29, 2010 11:49 am
by radiance
Hi,

Python is slow yes.
one of the tricks that helps is setting up a ram drive to export your OBJ file to when exporting animations.
This is a virtual disk that actually takes some of your system memory, and it blazingly fast for saving/loading OBJ data.
google for 'ramdrive for windows XXXX', and i'm sure you'll find tools to set one up.

Radiance

Re: Export speed

Posted: Tue Jun 29, 2010 6:49 pm
by kivig
radiance wrote:Hi,

Python is slow yes.
one of the tricks that helps is setting up a ram drive to export your OBJ file to when exporting animations.
This is a virtual disk that actually takes some of your system memory, and it blazingly fast for saving/loading OBJ data.
google for 'ramdrive for windows XXXX', and i'm sure you'll find tools to set one up.

Radiance
There's alike problem with v-ray exporter. If I'm not confusing something author made a custom build that had certain functions programmed into blender instead of python script. That made export about 10x faster. Maybe such functions could be included in blender as built in by default afterward. But that's more like fine-tune and could wait long.

Somehow didn't thought of RAMdrive. Thanks!

Re: Export speed

Posted: Wed Jun 30, 2010 8:19 am
by kivig
radiance wrote:Hi,
one of the tricks that helps is setting up a ram drive to export your OBJ file to when exporting animations.
Radiance
Hmm... not a big gain. Export was taking about 1m15s now it is 1m10s. Used Dataram Ramdisk.

Re: Export speed

Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2010 12:07 pm
by ROUBAL
I'm a Blender user, and so far, I have not rendered more than 15 frames animations for testing, because of the huge export time. I got between 2 and 3 minutes per frames for my detailed Land Rover.

It is very frustrating, as the rendering time itself on my GTX260 (which is not a very powerful card) can be set around 1 min with a sufficient quality.

If this can be improved by coding the exporter differently inside Blender itself, it would be a good thing to report that on Blender forum.

Re: Export speed

Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2010 1:24 pm
by radiance
Hey,

It won't be long before you can do camera animation paths etc in octane, and we might come up with a faster solution for exporting soon.


Radiance

Re: Export speed

Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2010 11:37 am
by ROUBAL
Good news ! Improving the exporting speed would be really something important. I'm sure that currently the huge exporting time is something that prevents many of us from rendering animations with Octane.

Re: Export speed

Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2010 6:12 pm
by livuxman
Taking into account that Octane uses the gpu seems obvious to use the cpu while doing the render is a good option and is the one I used in my animation. In this way, the plug-in, while rendering a frame, was exporting the next, so that when octane ending render a frame begins the next without lost time.

Cheers

Re: Export speed

Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2010 7:35 pm
by caronte
Very good idea ;)

Re: Export speed

Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2010 7:44 pm
by face
livuxman wrote:Taking into account that Octane uses the gpu seems obvious to use the cpu while doing the render is a good option and is the one I used in my animation. In this way, the plug-in, while rendering a frame, was exporting the next, so that when octane ending render a frame begins the next without lost time.

Cheers
Realy nice idea ;)
But it can make conflicts to export to the same filename.
And when Octane crashed, we lost the old mesh.
Hm, maybe we can export to a tmp and if the render is finished, delete the old and rename the new...

face