tracking down a specific map/ optimising to death.

[super gnu]

ive been tasked with wringing every second of rendertime saving out of a huge model. has to render in 5 mins a frame,at full HD, and look great. its about 36000 objects spread over several km. in its initial state its approaching 40 mins a frame and looking ok ish.


anyway im at the point where the processsing of instances and bitmaps and other guff that happens before rendering commences is a significant portion of the whole rendertime.

in particular it gets stuck on "loading bitmaps, map#19" for about 20 seconds. i tried looking in the material browser and searching for map #19, but nothing comes up.. this could either be due to the crapness of the material browser, or vray naming things differently?

if it says "loading bitmaps" does that rule out any procedural textures?


anyone know how to track down this elusive map#19?

while we are on the subject, anyone got any nice tricks to really make vray fly?

planning to swap sun for a direct light with a shadow map... but i suspect this may take longer. could also use scripting to select all materials with glossies below say, 0.8 and turn them off, or swap to specular highlights only..

tried turning off map filtering but that made things look really crap. also cant really drop the aa any more as its animation and has lots of nice fine detail in the distance.


any ideas most appreciated.

[Neilg]

drop all reflection depths to 1, unless it's actually glass.

find large bitmaps - http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/sc...-large-bitmaps

using any displacement? are the objects instances copied around, and is there any way to use a scatter plugin?

are you allowed to post an image? that may help.

if you're using LC, checking on use light cache for glossy rays, setting your interp samples to 100 and checking on the pre filter may help. what are your current settings/method of rendering?

[super gnu]

ref depth already at 1, big bitmaps are only the ones on the landscape (at least, ive been through the maps folder checking jpeg sizes, nothing out of the ordinary)
no displacement, object instances are all instances as far as i can tell.


im tempted to try swapping out all the bitmap loaders for vrayhdri using a script, but im dubious about the speed savings.. its supposed to be faster, but in my tests it was slower, due to converting all my 8 bit textures to 32 bit before rendering.

[vlado]

im tempted to try swapping out all the bitmap loaders for vrayhdri using a script, but im dubious about the speed savings.. its supposed to be faster, but in my tests it was slower, due to converting all my 8 bit textures to 32 bit before rendering.

For 8-bit textures, it won't be any faster. Make sure that the 3ds Max Bitmap pager is disabled though.

The "Loading bitmaps" phase does not include procedural textures, only bitmaps and VRayHDRI. Also, once the map is loaded, subsequent renders should be fast enough. Keep in mind that the texture may be used for displacement, VRayFur, V-Ray lights or otherwise attached to the scene without a material.

Other than that, I have found the Material Explorer in 3ds Max 2012 useful for tracking such issues down.

Best regards,
Vlado