Vray proxy doesn't render at 100% cpu

[3LP]

Hi there,
I'm having some problems to render a high ress mesh that we are working on for the moment.
I have transform the mesh in vray proxy so I could use it more than once.

But my render doesn't use 100% of my cpu, although for all the other render that I have done so far, it does.
I have Max 2010 SP4a
i7 920 12 Go ram

My ram doesn't go higher than 6 Go. I have try all the possibilities with the Dynamic memory limit.
I have try Auto, static, dymanic, and raise the limit to 11500 MB and nothing works.
Well with the default 400 Mb my cpu is at about 25 % and when I put 11500MB it rise to 75 % but doesn't go higher but my ram doesn't go higher than 6 Go and I have 12 Go.

Could someone please tell me what 'm doing wrong ? Or is that a regular problem with vrayproxy? I don't think so, I haven't had that problem when I was dealing with vrayproxy for trees.

I have allso tried without texture motionblur, dof, only a domelight, but same problem.

Thanks

Stan
3LP Team

[vlado]

How many unique proxies are there? V-Ray has to load the proxy geometry from disk; this happens during the actual rendering and only one core at a time can read from the disk. Once the proxies are loaded, rendering should go on at full speed though.

Best regards,
Vlado

[BBB3]

Hi Stan,
I had this problem before. What is the proxy you are using?
Vray does not like proxies that are made of "instances" of the same object, for instance several blades of grass. When modeling or importing an object that will be used as proxy, make sure you collapse it into a single mesh before exporting it to a vray mesh.
B

[3LP]

Thanks for you responce.

Vlado, I have 4 proxys, if I count the number of polygons that are used in all the 4 proxies, I have : 2,2 million poly. That's not so much, it's the only thing that I have in my scene (instanced 4 times) with a HDRI in a domelight.
But I realise that in my render, only 2,95 Go are used. I have rendernode with 4go ram and other with 6go. There are all rendering between 25 et 50 % on the cpus.
Only the workstations that are with 8 et 12 Go ram are rendering bewteen 95 and 100% cpu.
But what is verry strange, is that all servers are using 3go of ram to render, but the computer with 8 or more are rendering faster. Make any sens if they had different ram usedge I could understand...

I don't understand why, I have pushed the dynamic limite to 10500Mo and they are still not using all the ram needed for the rendering.
Is there a sort of failsafe security on the dynamic memory limite that limite the memory usage at 50% of the ram ? Eaven if I push the memory limite higher than what the computer has?

Thanks BBB3, I have tried your solution but it doesn't changed anything, but wourth the try

Stan
3LP Team

[3LP]

Hi there !

I think I found the problem, but don't know how to solve it.
When I'm taking my scene, and put a vray standard gray material, my scene render fast : 75-95%.

So the problem would be the textures. I had disable filter maps and when I set filter maps again, the render is a bit more faster, but is always blocked to 40-50%

Is there a reason why textures would slow down the rendering ?
I use 10-15 textures that are all at 7500x7500 resolution.

Thanks

Stan
3LP Team

[3LP]

Well,
I have transfer my scene completely to max2008 and now I have another strange problem.

When i'm rendering, the render nodes that are q6600 (quad - 4Go Ram) they render all at 95-100%. But my i7 (920 - 6Go ram) render only at 50%.

It seems that there is something to do with the number of cores, I have also rised the dynamic memory limit.
I really knock my head on the walls here, it's been 3 days that I search to render this project. I have 40 seconds of rendering to do and i really need that all my render nodes works correctly. Vlado, Help? )

Stan
3LP Team

[vlado]

Does it render fine if you do not use textures?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Dave_Wortley]

Hi Vlado, I'm having similar issues and I think it has something to do with Raycaster memory settings for Hyperthreading. I'll try explain as best I can... (without rambling too much!) Vray SP3 and Sp4....

We have scene with something like 30 unique Vray Proxy meshes in the scene, with something like 3000 vray proxies within the scene. The proxies are all bits of vegetation, so all pretty heavy, it's almost 1gb of files so quite heavy. We've done a few projects like this and not had any issues. Rendering usage is normally almost 100% all the time.

We initially thought our slow-down was because of loading over our network, so I wrote a script which runs pre-render which collects all the .vrmesh files and copies them locally, so there's definetely no slow-down because of network pulling.

It seems to only be affecting our newest render blades, Our other blades are 4 cores and 8 core. We've recently upgraded our render farm and we now have a nice farm full of Intel Xeon e5530, 2 physical cores, 4 processing cores, hyperthreaded, so that means we get 16 Render Buckets

Vray normally has no issues using all 16cores except when it comes to VrayProxies where normally the CPU drops to 50% or lower.... By looking at the task manager you can see either, 50% of the Cores doing all the work and the other 50% doing nothing, or you'll see all the CPUs working but maybe only a couple above 50% usage and most below 25% usage, which adds up to 50% Total usage.

Ram doesn't seem to be a factor either, the Physical ram is mostly being used but the Page file is still hardly used, We upped one of the blades up to 24gb of RAM and it still had exactly the same issue.

I've done some experimentation and by tweaking the Raycaster settings I can get Vray to use about 90-95%, so it's rendering each bucket, but rendering each bucket much slower.....

I haven't done any proper benchmarking tests yet but it's on my todo list, and if you'd find it useful for solving this issue I can make it a priority as we could really do with a solution to this.

@Stan, Try these settings and see if they improve your rendering....

Max Tree Depth 40
Min leaf size 0.0
Face/level coef. 2.0
Dynamic Memoery limit 3000mb

That should get your CPUs using 100% of their power but you might notice that buckets take longer to render, it's just a battle of seeing is it worth each bucket rendering slower and having all the buckets rendering the image....

I shall hopefully look into this more soon and will report back..

[vlado]

Do you use 3ds Max 2010? Does it get better if you disable any bitmap textures? Also, if you can get us some test scenes that we can troubleshoot here it will be helpful.

Best regards,
Vlado

[pascalls]

Max 2010 vray sp4a

I had exactly same problem rendering scenes with high proxy numbers: on certain parts of the scene cpu usage went down to 10% on all 8 render nodes.

The file was rendering fine untill we edded more proxy cars and cpu usage went down to 10% although there was no any kind of error reported like the "performance degradation" error message.

Increasing dynamic memory limit (that was already on ~1600mb) solved the problem.

hope someone will find this usefull....

[^Lele^]

Increasing dynamic memory limit (that was already on ~1600mb) solved the problem.

Was my very first thought when i read the post title: Dynamic geometry: raise the dyn. mem limit.

[Dave_Wortley]

We've got our dynamic memory limit set to 4gb and it still has issues, I think it might have to do with other objects in the scene, and possibly texture maps but it's quite difficult to benchmark.

[scheinbarreal]

maybe VRayFur?

[pascalls]

I only started having this cpu usage problem when I got confident using vray proxies and started adding lots of proxies of trees, bushes, cars etc to my scenes so I deducted that it must be an issue first with the proxy objects and second with the dynamic memory.

This is how the problem manifested it self here: you start rendering and everything goes fine on all computers that are rendering this file (8 render nodes on 1 gig network in my case). The moment first bucket hits the area densely populated with proxies (car park surrounded with the landscape with many different proxies in this particular file) cpu usage went down to 10% on all render nodes. The moment this area with proxies was rendered cpu usage went to 100% untill it reached another proxy when it went down to 10% again. No matter what I did with the textures, xrefs, render setting, DR, changing router etc helped resolve this. The moment i increased dyn memory limit by 100% the problem went away. As i said before, vray didnt report any error normally associated wit the low dyn memory limit.

Just saying what happened to me.

[^Lele^]

We've got our dynamic memory limit set to 4gb and it still has issues, I think it might have to do with other objects in the scene, and possibly texture maps but it's quite difficult to benchmark.

Look at your task manager.
If your memory graph hits a plateau, and then draws something looking like the teeth of a saw, while the cpu is staying low, try and increase the dyn mem limit: that means you are forcing vray to swap dynamic geometry in and out of ram.
If your memory graph keeps raising and raising, up to the maximum amount of ram, the the dynamic mem limit is high enough (watch out not to swap to disk, ofc), and once everything is loaded, your cpu should just shoot up to 100% or thereabouts.

Try isolating your dynamic geometry at first, to debug the scene.