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Hair is loading slowly?
Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2021 2:22 pm
by Hurricane046
Hello,
I've just started a new project with a 3D fox as a main protagonist. Once I went above like 100k individual hairs (6 segment) the LV started to respond VERY slowly to changes made to the hair.
Each hair geometry change or even reinitiating the LV takes like 5 sec. The render itself is fast, but the load/refresh of the LV is slowing down very quickly.
What happens when I hit 1 mil? Or even 4 mil individual hairs? Is it possible I'm doing something wrong? I've already disabled the native Hair C4D rendering module.

Thanks for any kind of help!

Re: Hair is loading slowly?
Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2021 3:10 pm
by aoktar
Any change on mesh with related to hair that will trigger updates. For example this is log out from 150.000 strands
Export materials time= 4.97 ms
Collect objects time= 8.11 ms
Mesh creation time = 887.077 ms.
Api update time: 3.853 ms.
As you can see it takes N time to recreate and 4xN time to update again. So pause updates during hair editing.
Re: Hair is loading slowly?
Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2021 7:18 am
by Hurricane046
So it's normal correct? Whenever I want geo update on the fur it simply takes like 5 sec, or even 15 sec for high end fur? I guess it's because it's building these cylindrical hairs instead of just using flat planes for example?
EDIT: Just tried it with Ornatrix. It's 10 times faster and looks great!
Re: Hair is loading slowly?
Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2021 9:41 am
by aoktar
Is normal for what? It's doing that in highest performance of the tool. And plugin exports the data as hair primitives.
Re: Hair is loading slowly?
Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:23 am
by Hurricane046
I meant if it's normal it takes 1 mil hair 10-15 sec to initialize LV with default C4D hair module. It's very hard to develop the design with such long response time.
But the problem disappeared when I switched to Ornatrix + Octane.
It literally takes 1 second to initialize 1 mil hair with 4 segments. It's crazy mega super fast and works like a charm with Octane.

Re: Hair is loading slowly?
Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:28 am
by aoktar
I'm saying the same. There is no room to improve that. Keep going with which is better for you.
Re: Hair is loading slowly?
Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2022 3:16 pm
by jeremyshin
Sorry to re-activate the post but I am facing the same problem with C4D R25.
I have a scene with a character and all grooming is done with C4D native hair objects. In total I may have around 150000 generated hairs. All dynamics disabled.
The render itself is very fast but everytime I click somewhere in the C4D interface the Octane live viewer is re-updating the scene, causing to wait around 30 seconds for it to update.
I do not have Ornatrix, is there a way to prevent the LV to update at every single move I do in the scene?
Thank you
Re: Hair is loading slowly?
Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2022 5:19 pm
by jayroth2020
Ornatrix optimized their plugin to work with Octane. The Cinema 4D hair engine is general purpose — all of the C4D hair data must be sent over to the GPU in order for Live Viewer to shade it. Depending upon how many hairs you have, that can take some time. The process is as optimized as it can be at present.
Re: Hair is loading slowly?
Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2022 7:19 pm
by aoktar
There is not a cheap way to detect an update message is correct or not for a hair. Only possible to compare the data which is hold in memory but it's heavy and expensive. So only way I can think to do something on user level. As pausing geometry updates, or something you can find as using dummy meshes
Re: Hair is loading slowly?
Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2022 8:41 am
by jeremyshin
@jayroth2020 @aoktar Thanks for the answer. It makes sense when I see how my OOC memory has exploded. Ornatrix is way too expensive for my use at the moment si I guess I am going to have to deal with the update slow speed.
One thing tho that I never understand is that every time I click somewhere (it can be a tab or, text field or any random stuff), octane is re-updating the scene. I don't get it because I don't make any change on Octane's level and it just uselessly reload the LV render and run the GPUs. Any words about this?
Thanks