geo updates during rendering question

[bartolos]

Hi all,

Just wondering - when I have a heavy geo that is mostly static through all the frames of the animation, just a few points get shifted on one frame in the middle of the sequence. Is the plugin smart enought to detect that and not do any updates for most of the time, but just does it at the frame where the points shift?

Right now I think it's pushing the geo to the GPU at every frame.

I tried to optimize by splitting that into to 2 static geos, one before the point shift, the other one after, and switching them with visibility... but that still needs those geos to be on the update list in the ROP... and effectively they also get pushed to GPU at every frame.

I've been using Octane for C4D and there they find out about such cases and the rendering just flies from frame to frame without updating the geos where that's not needed.

Another thing ... I had a case where I was projecting UVs from a moving camera at some geo, and Octane wasn't updating that in the render even though the object was explicitly specified to be updated on the update list in the ROP. I had to add a dummy point that was animated to force the geo update the UVs per frame.

This case kinda suggests the plugin tries to be smart about the updates, and tries to avoid them where the points are not moving... but somehow it gets easily confused?

I'd be glad if anyone could sched some light on this.

I am wasting extremely much render time on those unnecessary geo updates. Literally all the fantastic speed I get from Octane gets out the window because most of the time it's waiting for the geo to be pushed around.

Cheers!
Bartek

[ricky_otoy]

Hi bartolos,

Please can you send us a test scene for that specific case and we will have a look. There should already be some improvements in how SOP updates are handled while IPR is running - which version are you using at the moment?

Do you have a reference clip or anything of how it is working in C4d for your needs?

Thx!

[bartolos]

Hi Ricky, thanks for your quick reply.

I will prepare a scene shortly. Meanwhile just a note this is not about IPR but rather offline rendering to disk. It just takes a lot of time between frames. Specifically just before the sampling kicks in. I used detail wrangles to printf when geo gets cooked... and it seems to be happening way more than needed (even when there is nothing changing in the geo. it's not time dependent in *any* way.)

Cheers
Bartek