Large scene management: Unloading materials? (xrefs/layers)

[Polygons]

I have a scene with many dozens of materials with 4k+ maps in several channels. Sending the scene to IPR is really quite slow (on the order of a minute) because of material generation. I'm wondering if anyone has a good method to stop a mat being generated/disabling it along with the geo. I've tried layers, but the mats still get generated even when disabled, and i've tried xrefs, which still generate materials when the xref is unloaded. It would be helpful to be able to isolate a few assets withing the scene and quickly iterate on them without having to generate a ton of other materials that i want to avoid loading.

If anyone has an alternate approach i'd love to hear it.

[aoktar]

it's required to be loaded because that's realtime renderer and its workflow isn't proper for your wish. Do you have C4D shaders in materials?

[Polygons]

The images are all loaded through Octane Image Texture nodes, but some are piped through gradients to tweak them. Maybe this adds to the material compilation time. Looking again, the slower ones are using 4k PNG textures. If they're using PNG compression it's possible that it's just taking a while to decompress on send. I'll convert any PNGs to TIFF and see if that helps.

[aoktar]

yes png is slowest I suppose. Other formats should help

[Polygons]

Changing PNG to TIF gives a large speed boost. Would be great to be able to load/unload materials at will, or disable individually them with a parameter . Understandable if it's not technically possible though

[aoktar]

Changing PNG to TIF gives a large speed boost. Would be great to be able to load/unload materials at will, or disable individually them with a parameter . Understandable if it's not technically possible though

I have tried to implement that in past times. But it gives enormous problems. Hard to explain the all but mostly breaks our mix material system and also caused some other problems. I haven't give up completely but it's not time to try again. This is easily possible in animation rendering(has an option) but not for LV.

[Polygons]

Makes sense, thanks for the responsiveness!

[aoktar]

Makes sense, thanks for the responsiveness!

Nice to see that making sense. Sometimes hard to explain the complicated cases. There is some balance between interactive performance and features. I'm trying to keep stability and performance on high priority.