Baffled by RT

[PGD]

Now I've seen plenty of videos of RT in action, and it appears to be a step in the right direction.. So does everyone use it all the time now?

Try to use it on my own machine however and the results are somewhat different, its great rendering a shinny tea pot but really quite slow when used in a scene with any sort of weight to it (1.6m poly). I'm no computer boffin either (and so I think much of the instructions out there are difficult to understand) so can you help a novice get up to speed with using RT?

Many tests illustrate GPU being much faster that CPU rendering, do I need to choose GPU somewhere within RT to take advantage of these speeds? I can't see where I get such an option

The graphics card in the machine (which is a Mac Pro running 64bit Windows 7 via bootcamp & 8gb RAM btw) is a 'ATI Radeon HD 5700' - Is that good?

Any help greatly received

Cheers
Phil

[vlado]

Now I've seen plenty of videos of RT in action, and it appears to be a step in the right direction.. So does everyone use it all the time now?

I don't think so; it's great to have it in certain situations, but it is not very useful for large scenes. V-Ray 3.0 will bring progressive rendering for the production renderer, so that feature might be more useful for heavy scenes.

The graphics card in the machine (which is a Mac Pro running 64bit Windows 7 via bootcamp & 8gb RAM btw) is a 'ATI Radeon HD 5700' - Is that good?

Unfortunately, no. For the moment you really need an nVidia GPU.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

In my opinion RT really has a lot of potential, but by not being used in production a lot has not been pushed as far as it can be. I hope in time this will change

I personally find it very useful for rendering, as a renderer its really easy to work with, but you need a lot of processing power! presently I got 15 12 core xeon machines working for me and just working in it is really amazing.

[Alan Iglesias]

Phil, if you'd like to evaluate GPU rendering for your particular application, the best thing for you to do would be to grab a 4GB GTX 680, install it, and start to see what RT/GPU can do for you now, and in the future.

Make sure of course that you are using openCL or the CUDA (both GPU) modes, and start to mess around with smaller scenes, noting how fast they render and how interacting with the scene in real time while rendering can help your workflow. As you build up your scene size, note the amount of RAM being used so you can establish what your needs are going to be. Remember that you can help control RAM usage by limiting texture size in RT/GPU.

In the begining you will likely use RT/GPU for mostly setting up lighting and materials as well as previewing textures, reflections, refractions, camera composition, etc. Just this can be a big help to your workflow and and is lots of fun besides.

As the capabilities of RT/GPU continue to expand, and the availability of powerful, relatively inexpensive (I hope) GPU cards increases, you will likely find yourself using RT for more and more of your project. Whether or not you ever use it for much of your final production work is a function of many different issues, but I'd bet that all in all, your 3D work will be that much better off for getting into this now rather than later.

Knowledge is power, and learning about the latest advances in your industry can only be an advantage.

Best,

-Alan

[Dman3d]

In my opinion RT really has a lot of potential, but by not being used in production a lot has not been pushed as far as it can be. I hope in time this will change

I personally find it very useful for rendering, as a renderer its really easy to work with, but you need a lot of processing power! presently I got 15 12 core xeon machines working for me and just working in it is really amazing.

not to hi-jack this thread but that makes me feel ill with envy. I have a big farm at work but we have to split up the resources.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

RT well its quite good but a little bit unstable. I like it a lot and it do save me some quality time. Just wish it was a bit more stable/responsive with heavy scenes. Other than that it works and I use it.

[Morbid Angel]

well normally I could never use this many machines, as there would be people using them during the day, but we have some down time now during the holidays, so its a joy I can't wait till Phi will be around...

[Morbid Angel]

the only way the stability is going to improve if people track the errors/crashes and send them to chaos group, if no one reports them, they wont get fixed...

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Humh true, maybe a crash system submit out of vray UI ? dream hehe

In any case I think I'm more annoyed by very long times of preping scenes to render and so on. Somehow spraytrace/caustics visualizer are a lot more resposive but then I guess its because they are a bit simpler? Not sure. I'm using RT with 3 pcs(however 1 recently refuse to work lol) so I'm quite OK once I get it running

The PHI... if that card works o man... =D

[Morbid Angel]

what I do is have the windows system explorer running all the time, when maya crashes or vray, i create a mini dump of the current state of maya/vray at the crash point and also describe in my report what I did to make it crash and hopefully guys at chaos group can reproduce this issue and fix it!

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Mmm thats the problem. It done really crash... it just hangs and stays hang for a very long time at which point I close render view and start it again. If it was crashing then I could try to reproduce it etc etc but when it just hangs its just idle ;/

[tashko.zashev]

Hi Dedal,

Do you have this RT issue only with particular heavy scene?
You can archive and send your scene to support@chaosgroup.com , so we will investigate what is causing it.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Heya

Humh, will try it out today (if time allows), but I think he have hard time creating car paint most of the time and recreating it, I think I'm using around 2/4k texture there with simple mode which takes long to compute and then it hags. Will try to reproduce it and then send u the scene.

Thanks, bye.