190h05m and still rendering

[TheBadger]

Hi again Oshyan,
Please tell me what you think of this.

I recently lowered my bucket size from default to the number Jo gave me. When doing a crop of the middle portion of the scene, about 9% of the total image, I saw a speed boost in the render. I have been rendering a crop of the lower left corner, again about 9% of the total image, its at 32hours now. What is it about the lower left corner that it gets so slow there?

I am rendering these crops at my original settings from page 1.

What are you thinking now that you have seen the files?

[Oshyan]

I have still been running other tests so I haven't been able to load the file on my newer workstation with more RAM. Trying to load on my older machine (also an i7 though) resulted in a hang every time, so I'm waiting until I can try it on the new machine. I think this scene may just require more than 16GB of RAM though! Which would be a shame as I couldn't troubleshoot then.

As for the differences you're seeing, while bucket sizes can definitely help, I don't think you should really see a *dramatic* difference. I do also think that testing with crops is not really going to tell you the whole story.

I don't know why that particular corner takes so long, but I'm curious to find out if I can. Tomorrow I should be able to test loading of the file on my newer system. Hopefully it will work.

- Oshyan

[TheBadger]

Thanks.

[Dune]

@Oshyan; you could load one set of ivy image maps and rewire the (so many identical) object parts to the one (or two) defaults. That's what I did in the medieval town. It would of course save a lot of memory, TG not having to load the same texture hundreds of times. You're probably smart enough to do that even in a text editor, which I didn't.

[Oshyan]

Yeah, I may do that, but I'm discovering now that, though it uses a lot of memory, the objects actually load quickly. What it appears to be hanging on are some very large Painted Shader data blobs.

Badger, does this TGD take long to open for you? Maybe it's just slowing down right at the Painted Shader coincidentally, after it's loaded the objects and maxed out RAM, and now going to the page file or something. Not sure. But if it takes you a long time to load too, then it's probably just an efficiency issue with the Painted Shader. I expect there are quite a lot of strokes in the ones in your TGD. This may also be contributing to the render time, though I can't say for sure yet.

I'll continue attempts to load and investigate...

- Oshyan

[Oshyan]

Well, I was right, removing the Painted Shader data got it to load and it took *way* less memory. I suspect the way you're using the Painted Shader is probably pretty inefficient. There has to be better ways to do what you're doing. Without being able to visualize where the Painted Shader strokes are, I can't be more specific, but maybe you can illustrate that. Or maybe if I remove the objects I can look at the Painted Shader data on its own, but both loading together seems to be too much for my machine. Congratulations, you've killed my beastly (or so I thought) workstation!

On another note, once it did finally load I discovered a bunch of image files I'm missing, so it looks like there's more to send me if you can. These are the ones I identified as missing (there may be more):
maze3.tif
stonewall2Bump.tif
stonewall2.tif
efeubranch.png (seems vital for the ivy objects - I suppose I could go download it with Ivygen, but easier if you send to me)

- Oshyan

[TheBadger]

Oshyan,

Yes, it takes a very long time to open, relative to my other projects. *But*, it took that long before I added the painted shaders. After they were added, I did not note any increase in the time it took to load.
When I stared to paint I realized that I had to deselect the populations of moss. Otherwise it was near impossible to move the camera to paint. When I deselected the Moss objects (everything other than the Ivy(s)) I was able to move the camera freely.
I was not happy with the control I gained over the moss populations in those few areas that I used the painted shaders, but it was close to what I wanted so I went with it.

Sorry I forgot those files! I am uploading them now. You should have them in less than 7min.

The painted shader strokes are *mostly* right in the center left wall, the only wall that stands by its self from my camera perspective. It has almost no ivy on it.

[TheBadger]

transfer complete, Please verify.

*I also forgot to tell you that the painted shaders a new. They were not used in the longer render posted on page3*

[Oshyan]

Confirmed, but since I still can't load with the Painted Shaders intact, I'm not sure how much more investigation I can do. I would really like to know how much the Painted Shaders might be affecting render time, but can't test that myself. Perhaps you can find a way (maybe try much lower resolution and detail tests, with Painted Shaders enabled and disabled). If they don't make a huge difference, then I can remove them and work on other possible optimizations, which I'd very much like to do.

Edit: I see you mentioned the Painted Shaders are new! Ok, interesting. So I'm going to remove them then and work on seeing if I can speed up the base render.

- Oshyan

[TheBadger]

Yes, please disconnect anything, make any change do what ever seems right. I only want to know if the render time is natural to the project, or if I am going about everything in the wrong way. In the end, if you can teach me how to get my render time down by some %, than that is great! Because as I said I will proceed with this project even with a render time horror show.
Also, I am just wondering, Is it now or will it be possible in the future to have two projects open on the same system. I would love to be working while Im rendering at the same station. Is this even possible in the technology sense?

Edit: I see you mentioned the Painted Shaders are new! Ok, interesting. So I'm going to remove them then and work on seeing if I can speed up the base render.

Yes, only added just before you provided a way to send the files. Get rid of them and don't think twice. I will just spend time playing with seed values until i find a similar effect.

[Oshyan]

Cool, I'll keep looking at it. Note however that I am heading to Alaska for a little over a week on Thursday and won't be able to do anything on it during that time. So it may have to wait until I return for any definitive feedback.

- Oshyan

[TheBadger]

Hi again,

Some more information.

Ok, so as I said I have been doing crop renders with the reduced bucket size. The first render with the new buckets finished in about 6 hours with mu setting from page one. This new crop, which you can see below, is at 106:13:50.

I just don't get it? that little section is whats slowing the whole render down as far as I can tell.

I have also posted a shot of whats going on with my memory (image 2). I have never seen TG2 do that to my system until this project, Its really crazy!

@Kadri, hey man, don't think I forgot to post the file you asked for, I just have to wait until this crop finishes. Because if there is no way to make this go faster, I really need that crop.

[jo]

Hi,

It does seem odd that part of the image is so slow when from what I've seen it's not that much different to the rest.

What is about the memory use that's striking you as different? Is it the amount that's being used? It doesn't seem to be causing VM paging so that's not going to be slowing things down.

It is down to 5 threads and I presume you've had as many as 16 running? I'm assuming you haven't change the render node thread settings.

Regards,

Jo

[TheBadger]

What is about the memory use that's striking you as different? Is it the amount that's being used? It doesn't seem to be causing VM paging so that's not going to be slowing things down.

It is down to 5 threads and I presume you've had as many as 16 running? I'm assuming you haven't change the render node thread settings.

Regards,

Jo

Yes, it is just that it's using so much memory. It does not bother me, but that I have never seen it use so much before. I was just really surprised! I don't know what VM paging is.

You are correct Jo, I did not change thread settings.

[Oshyan]

I think the memory use could be cut down a fair amount by linking all the ivy leaf shaders to the same Default Shader, but it would take a lot of work. Hopefully in the future we can make TG automatically recognize true duplicate resources.

- Oshyan