Speed tips for gigantic vrmesh cache files?

[joconnell]

Hi Folks,

I'm doing a job with some pretty large vrmesh cache files for a water job and the loading / preparation times for stuff like irmap or Light cache is seriously nasty. They're multiple 1 gig files so it's never going to be fun, but are there any raycast settings that I can look at to get things moving quicker?

First proper water job so any thoughts?

Cheers!

John

[Morbid Angel]

I can't give you suggestion regarding the raycasting, but what I had recently experienced with multiple large proxies, was that having them on local drive as oppose to network sped things up dramatically. We don't have the fastest server so it made a big difference.

[joconnell]

Yeah - I think it's basically the place I'm in being unprepared to do fluid jobs - the main file server is pretty good but if we start rendering vrmesh files of naiad caches with cloth xmeshes and what not, the compers start to complain when we render so we dumped our cache files onto another drive - it's likely all bandwidth but it's definitely killing things. I don't think the render nodes have enough storage space to take all the assets we need but I'll definitely have top look at some kind of syncing system for the next job - did you have many cache sequences to deal with yourself? Did you find any elegant solutions to work with them at all?

[Morbid Angel]

We used yeti for grass sims and so the geo was procedural, but some other grass I baked out as static into vray proxy, so it wasn't a sequence, otherwise it would have killed us. It sounds like one must have a pretty powerful server to handle all of that from the network. Either that, or develop a system (I've seen this before) where before a frame starts render a render machine pulls all necessary data to local disk, remaps paths renders the frame and then cleans up. Its tedious process though.

[joconnell]

Yeah - sounds like the type of thing that needs to be run over night or as a post sim process. Must look in to it if I ever do something similar again.