"from file" makes bigger render time

[Mikokariadis]

Hi, long time lurker, first time poster.

Am having a situation where if Irradiance Map and Photon Map are calculated and then image is rendered, render time is x. If those saved Irradiance and Photon Maps are then used to render with the "from file" option, the render time increases to almost x times 2. So many questions, so little time before work has to go to the renderfarm...any thoughts on this please drop a couple lines.

Thing is I remember testing stuff like this and the times for each render, either continuous after calc, or from file option, were the same.

btw it is actually more then x times 2 if in a LWF method.

Thanks for reading.

[Morbid Angel]

i've never encountered this, but i can guess its something to do with the way its being loaded into ram. How much ram do you have? are you using 64 bit? is the map loaded of the network?

[Mikokariadis]

Hi, Dmitry.

This is running on a 32 bit machine, dynamic memory limit all the way up to 3 Gb, machine is 6 Gb (though windows doesnt of course use it all) windows is with /3gb. The only way I can get some pretty heavy proxys to render.

Maps are local though they load through usage of UNC path.

[Morbid Angel]

hmm...well what kind of result do you get on a simple scene? is it as bad of a performance? Maybe try to see how much those map take on disk, could be that they are so large they take too long to load and run out of memory and start to swap.

[Mikokariadis]

Around 9 Mb for the vrl and 2 Mb for the vr.
Simple scenes dont get this sort of double time with "from file" but there is a slight overhead, but just in the order of a second or two.

[gimiky]

not sure if this is related or not, but on a recent project, i had incredibly long render times when rendering using a saved irradiance map that was calculated using slightly different geometry position. if i recalculated with updated geometry, render times went back to what one would expect..

[Mikokariadis]

Did a test with a frozen vray camera gimiky, calc&render in one sweep was 11:11s, 6:31:08 of that was for the render.

Using the saved map files and just rendering from that took 11:13:08.

Did a 2nd "from file" test for the heck of it and it went for 11:44s.

And this is at 720x405, it's gonna be a blood bath in 720p.

vrlmap was around 16 Mb and the vrmap was just about 5.6Mb

[gimiky]

are you on 1.5 sp3a?

[Mikokariadis]

Yes, something related to the non-a release sprung to mind?

[gimiky]

no, just culling information.. what happens if you try different geometry modes (dynamic/static) and/or adjust your dynamic memory limit?

[Mikokariadis]

Let me check that one.

...changed to Static...render time went to 2:48...I will rest now...knowing that I will not get fired because of this. I love ya man.

If you ever need a statue built in your honour or something like that...you know where I am at. Yes, idolatry.

Man this was gonna be a money blood bath at the farm...geesh.

Thank you.

Scalable at 720p, same frame calc+render 11:37, 5:43 of that just for the render. Using saved maps took 6:42 to render.

Also thank you Dmitry for hinting at this on a previous post, it just flew way over my head when you mentioned it.

[Neilg]

That still sounds like incredibly long rendertimes - unless you're on an old p4 you should be able to get them much lower than that.

[Mikokariadis]

Hi cubiclegangster.
Vray disp modifier for a 200 meter per 60 meter lawn does that to my overclocked i7.
Cannot wait for the nehalem ex come December/January, until then I will endure the wait.