Vrimg2exr tooooooooooo SLOW

[bob-cat]

Very frustrating after waiting 4 hours for a high res 5k render (not complaining about that) and then wait around 45 minutes just to pull the 10 channels out of the .vrimg file which is 1.7gb in size?.

I am using Shimakazes batch with the latest version of vrimg2exr.exr in c:drive?

I have just increased the buffer to 300 which is speeding it up a bit, but just not fast enough.

This has been an issue for me for a long time across many versions of max and vray.

Currently Max 2011 64bit + VRay 2.00.02

Is this normal, for that size file? Whats the bottle neck, looking at my processors and ram ussage not much is happening, cpu running at 9% and ram @ 4gb (out of 12gb).

[muoto]

Why not just save as .exr directly ?

[vlado]

Use the -bufSize option to allow vrimg2exr to use more memory for the conversion.

Best regards,
Vlado

[tct70]

Use the -bufSize option to allow vrimg2exr to use more memory for the conversion.

Best regards,
Vlado

Please tell me where I would find or enter this.

Thanks

[joconnell]

vrimg2exr.exe filename.vrimg -compression zips -datawindow -bufsize 100 would be what I'd normally use for converting a vrimg to an exr for nuke.

Filename.vrimg is the input file you want to convert, no surprises there. "-compression zips" is the type of compression you want to apply, which is to do with the way the image information is stored. Vray renders it's images into tiles by default so that each bucket it renders is saved out as a square of the final image, but some other software such as nuke prefers it's images saved as lines from top to bottom and is far faster in reading them this way. -Datawindow means that the exr file will use it's alpha channel to tell the program reading the file to skip sections where the images alpha is black. For example if you have a huge res image with only a tiny section of it used, the datawindow will tell the program reading the file to skip all the empty sections. Lastly the -bufsize option tells vrimg2exr how much memory in megabytes to use as a buffer. On a recent tv series I was rendering a lot of files to hd res multichannel exr and each frame was around 70 megs so I had this value set to 100.

Hope this helps!

[tct70]

Brilliant! Thanks very much indeed fella.

Edit: I generally just double click on a file. Can this be done via the settings option?

[joconnell]

These options are all command line switches and unfortunately there isn't any kind of ini file to set up defaults. This might all become irrelevant though with vray getting more controls in the frame buffer output to write to a temporary file and convert to exr after as part of the same rendering process.

[bob-cat]

Great, thanks to all the replies.

I have increased the buffer size to 1000, although this seem a bit excessive to me, it is pumping them out alot quicker.
Thanks all.

[vance3d]

Joconnell what exactly are you describing with regard to the vfb output options? is this something that is being added for a future release?

V Miller

[joconnell]

Vlado mentioned that he was going to be adding options to the frame buffer output so it also converted to exr as part of the process so there'd be no need to use the command line after. I'd imagine he'll at the very minimum put in the datawindow and scanline encoding for nuke, not sure on buffer size.

[vance3d]

The inclusion of those options would be quite welcomed. It would be great to eliminate the conversion step I do to vrimg's now.

V Miller

[simmsimaging]

Why not just save as .exr directly ?

One reason I don't is that network rendering large .exr files tends to create screwed up images. I'm using vrmg simply to be safe. What I would love is a photoshop plugin to open vrimg files directly, like proexr does. That would be the most elegant solution......

[bob-cat]

-> Brett +1 great idea.

[tct70]

I have downloaded the latest version of Shimakazes batch, bit dont have the option to increase the buffer size?

[bob-cat]

You have to set in the .bat file. Right click the vrimg2exr.bat and select "Edit", you will find it at the top and enter in a different value, I think the default is 10mb, I have mine at 1000.
Also, as default, it scans the vrimg for ALL the standard element channels that you can save which takes time. As I only use a couple of render elements (Reflection, ZDepth, etc) I have "rem #" out the other elements that I never use so its not scaning for these as well.