Rendering animation from max, very slow between frames

[chromaloma]

Hi. So I am rendering an animation with Vantage (or at least trying to), using the "Render animation with Vantage"-button in the 3ds max toolbar. It renders fine. Takes about 15 seconds each 4k frame. However, the time spent from frame to frame is seriously long, about 1 to 1,5 minute. Why? And what can I do about it? Seems like it hangs on 100% while doing something. I'm aware it's denoising and saving out, but I mean, 1,5 minute. With this speed, even our CPU farm is faster. GPU is 3090.


Also, I need to push the render times a lot. Like, the view in the viewport is rather nice, and just a tiny little better quality would do it for me at this point, to be able to meet the deadline. In my head, it should be 15 seconds per frame (or even 3-4 seconds, since the view in the viewport is already pretty nice), and max 5 seconds time saving out and preparing next frame. A whole day rendering out one 1200 frame sequence...

Ideas and help appreciated.

[vladimir.nedev]

What objects do you have in your 3dsMax scene ?

Do you have Forest Pack or Rail Clone with millions of instances maybe ?
Are you using edge mode for the forest objects ?

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[chromaloma]

What objects do you have in your 3dsMax scene ?

Do you have Forest Pack or Rail Clone with millions of instances maybe ?
Are you using edge mode for the forest objects ?

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

Thanks for responding. Yep, the scene is rather big. On the verge of 3090 GPU memory crash, actually. Forests, scene xrefs and so on. Do you think the load in-between is Max's fault, with loading/unloading mesh and that routine? I thought this was taken care of from within Vantage when the live-link was established, so that when it first is loaded in Vantage, even with live link, all geometry is there with no need for ram load/unload during rendering?

I also have animated objects in the scene, so it's not possible to export the vrscene. -> After exporting 90 of 1200 frames, the vrscene is already 9 gb, so I didn't go through with that option. Even though I desperately tried exporting static scene first, and then exporting the animated camera as a new .vrscene, and then merging that file in the static Vantage scene. So to say, the moving objects in the scene is the problem, as I need them. They are people, cars etc. But also the merged animated cameras didn't work (no motion) when imported in Vantage. I found it strange, but it's probably just me not having enough extensive knowledge about Vantage yet.

[npg]

Yes, the slowdown is caused by Max and V-Ray for Max with 99.9% certainty. It takes a long time to update the scene for the next frame when there are many instances, etc.

We are working on improving support for animation from vrscene files. Maybe our next update will fix some of your problems with that.

[chromaloma]

Ok thank you Do you have a public roadmap for the planned functionality in the coming Vantage versions?

[vladimir.nedev]

Have you tried hiding some of the larger (in terms of number of instances) Forest Pack objects and testing how fast the switching between frames is then ?

You can try:
- lowering the number of instances (and compensating by scattering larger combined objects).
- turning off camera culling of the instances (if the camera is animated, this makes the Forest object animated as well, so it needs to be updated every frame).
- using Chaos Scatter which is our own scattering solution and might be faster.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[chromaloma]

Just following up this. Unknown cause, but it actually went faster again after I rebooted the computer (doh). Must be some local networking issue or something clogging up.

[response]

I'm trouble shooting this issue now and in my test's the problem is definitely Forest Pro. My scene is unfortunately heavily dependent on this plugin. Will report back if I'm able to isolate the problem or a potential fix.

[chromaloma]

Would be interesting to hear about your findings.

[npg]

I think there was a similar thread some months ago where I commented that it seemed to go a bit faster if the Forest object is not selected in the Max UI or something like that... (no guarantee)

edit: found it https://forums.chaos.com/forum/chaos...64#post1148464

[response]

In my tests with this problem I may have incorrectly blamed Forest Pro. I managed to isolate the issue to some materials with bitmaps that were linked incorrectly. Using the Relink Bitmaps script by Colin Senner seems to have fixed the issue (for one shot so far). Time between frames was previously approx 40 seconds. Now time between frames is instant.