updating frame at time ...

[gnassbasti]

I have a question to something that comes up when rendering with V-Ray. When I start rendering I get a message in the output window saying "Updating frame at time (current frame)".

Usually this goes very fast and I hardly notice it. However if I render large scenes with a lot of geometry this can take up to several minutes.

I am not sure what is being done at this step, what is happening in the background and if there is any way of speeding it up, as it then takes longer than the actual rendering.

Can anyone help me out on this?

Thank you!

[t.petrov]

Hello,

In this step the V-Ray plugin extracts the values/data from all Maya nodes and converts them in format which the V-Ray renderer will understand.
Unfortunately this step can't be made multi-threaded, because of a limitation in the Maya's API.

Can you describe your scene?
Do you have many small objects or a few bigger ones?
What kind of object do you have in the scene - Meshes, Nurbs, Subdivs, Particles, something else?
Do you have animation and complex expressions and constrains and some heavy rigging?

/Teodor

[gnassbasti]

Hi Teodor,

This scene contains many small and a few large Polygon objects. The total poly amount is around 10 000 000. There are only Polygons and no viewport smoothing.
The scene contains some very basic keyframe animation and basic lighting.

Sebastien

[t.petrov]

It is all polygons you could convert all the geometry to VRay Proxy object.
Thus you'll save the extraction of geometry using the Maya API.

By the way how much time does it take with the 10m poly scene, exactly?
Can you try to pin point the problem?
For example render only the bigger objects or only the smaller ones.

/Teodor

[gnassbasti]

Basically, if I render the larger objects it updates the frame faster than the smaller ones (of which there are many more than the larger ones).

The total time of updating the frame with all the objects takes 50.1 seconds.

How do you convert the polys into VRay Proxy objects? do you have a link or so to describe this step?

[t.petrov]

Here are the docs for the proxy: http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/maya...oxy_params.htm

The time seems normal for 10m scene.
I've tried 1 object with 8m triangles and the update frame time is 25 seconds.