Heavy Proxy Animation Settings

[MegaPixel]

The attached image shows a test render I made over the weekend of a scene I'm developing to test the limits of our resources here in the office. With the exception of the landscape, the scene is entirely instanced proxies so far.

My first crack at rendering the image below took a horrifying 1.5 days using IRR/LC on World Units and Dynamic Memory Forced. I later learned from some posts here in the forums that those were bad things to do on large projects like this, so leaving LC on Screen and Memory on Auto got things down to under 3 hours, however I'd like to do much better then that. I've recently switched over to IRR/DMC and seem to be getting a tad faster, but with more noise.

At any rate, I was hoping someone could shed some light on which GI combination might be most efficient for a project like this. I appreciate your time


Using:
WindowsXP64 SP2/ 3dsMax Design 2009 SP1 / Vray 1.5 SP2 / 3.2Ghz QuadCore / 4Gig Mem

[khoross]

hi , the GI combination IRR/LC is good but is not the only thing u can do to speed up rendering , i think u should specify ur dynamic memorry @ 3000 MB or more , then u should see ur AA settings what setting AA can give u qualityvs speed.

another suggestion , using opacity map on trees will make rendering time alot slower, so try to render whitout them

[ene.xis]

on exteriors i rather use bruteforce and limit the secondary bounces to 2 or 3... LC in such situations (lots of proxies) becames a little less controlable imo

[MegaPixel]

Thanks guys - I think I may settle for IRR/Bruteforce on this one as I'm allready seeing frames produced in a fraction of the time as before. I haven't touched the dynamic memory limit yet because I'm not familiar with it enough to know how high to go with it? If there are certain PC's on the render farm with less RAM then others, should this limit not go above the minimum amount of physical RAM on the render farm pc?

Thanks again

[dcullipher]

Have you looked at your ram usage? I would suspect that you are getting the unloading geometry event for this render, or using alot of Virtual Memory. I have found 8G of ram to be the minimum now. Take a look at your task manager as it would be interesting to know what your usage is.

[duke2]

Basically, your dynamic memory limit in your case will determine how many proxies can be loaded into memory at any one time. It won't make much of a difference if you're only seeing 1 type of proxy in a bucket, but if you're seeing 3 or 4, it will. Set it to just below your system memory (4000 for 4096, 8000 for 8192, etc.). If you're rendering on a farm, system memory = render server memory so if one of your machines has 2048mb, set it to 2000.

[duke2]

Also, consider using a skylight for your foliage/proxies so you can still use LC for everything else. This will effectively mean you get single bounce GI on your trees. I haven't played around with this solution enough to know what i'm on about though.

[MegaPixel]

Thanks for the replies guys. As far as how much memory this scene uses when open, only 1.6g ram and about 2.1g ram when rendering. I'm actually not seeing any loading/unloading going on at render time. I've got the project now to where it's rendering each frame around 20 to 25 minutes. (which for me, I can live with)

The problem I'm having now is with getting my Irradiance map pre-solve to be quicker. I'm using the low preset settings with distance set to .5 and solving for every 5th frame right now. I can usually pre-run an Irr. map overnight and have it ready by the following morning but this morning, the thing is barely 1/4 through the shot. Then again, I do only have 1 pc running the calc...

Duke2, your alternate lighting for the trees technique sounds interesting. Wouldn't mind hearing more about that one.

Thanks Guys