Scene Setup question

[manelreig]

Hello,

I am trying to make my workflow the faster I can get using vray 3.6 and 3ds max 2018.
I have a new computer I7 8th gen, 32gb, win10, gtx 1080.

While everything is great and really fast, I noticed that as my numeber of materials increases, the vray (edu, iterative mode) "scene setup time" goes also up.
I am wondering what is vray calculating when it says: "xx opaque, xx double-sided render instances found out of xxx total" (xx=numbers)

The point is that sometimes it takes longer the "scene setup" than the render itself, and its a bit annoying to have 40 seconds of scene setup for 10 seconds render.
So if I know what is calculating vray at that point, maybe I can change my workflow or find other ways to get a quick response while been able to stopping and starting the render many times.

I know I could the render just on, while I change my materials, but sadly, while working in small Forest packs and changing parametres while rendering, cause 3ds max to crash...so I need to start and stop render in order to change material parametres without 3dsmax to crash.

I revised all my materials, and there is nothing strange on them, I mean all of them are using vray materials, or vray maps...

Any advice??
Thank you!!
Manel

[yavor.rubenov]

Hello,

First of all what is your Forest Pack version ? Initially there were issues with Forest Pack and interactive rendering that could cause crashes but newer versions should work fine.

Apart from this - rarely scene setup time goes up with more materials but with more geometry. How big are your scenes - how many different objects, faces etc ?

Best regards,
Yavor

[manelreig]

Hello Yavor,

thanks for you answer:
I am using Forest pack 5.4.1
There is no way to edit forest pack with interactive render...with the "edu iterative" mode crashes a lot...with vray RT CPU works better, but also at the end got the same crash...and with RT CUDA won't render at all if there is a "Forest Color" on the material, it says: cuda error 700, and then the Vray RT stop working till I restart 3ds max. If I could find a fix for the crashes in "edu iterative mode" while editing forest pack parametres or materials ,the "setup scene time" would be no matter for me...the crashes happen also with an empty scene and one forest pack.

The scene I think it is not really big. I mentioned that about the materials, because if I do an override material, the "scene setup" time simply disapears.:
Scene setup with override material: 1,2s
Scene setup with materials: 37,8 s

Scene details:
It is 577mb scene with two forest packs, one of grass and one of gravel.
the scene has 4.686.525 polygons
objects 398
shapes 1528 (but they are always turned off)
and about number of materials, do not know how to check it, but vray messages said "276 render instances" (is this the number of materials??)

Thank you very much!
Manel

[yavor.rubenov]

Best would be if you could send one such scene to our support they can check what is going on.

About the difference in setup time - one other thing that comes to mind is loading textures from disk. If you have many high res textures loading them could take some time. Are you using the native Max bitmap loader or VRayHDRI for textures ?