Why do VDBs take so long to submit to deadline?

[Dubbie99]

Title says it all really... VRay seems to read in the VDB for some reason instead of just throwing a link into the VRScene.

Why is this? and is there any way I can prevent this from happening? It takes forever to submit a scene to deadline.

I have even considered generating an empty VDB for scene submission, then replacing it with the real one with a pre-render script.

[ronald_a]

you need to read the vdb as packed disk primitive. This way vray will just link to it and not put it in the vrscene file.

[glacierise]

Even with packed disk primitives, some operations still take too long, I've had that issue before. VRScenes are still small but it takes a lot of time and memory to write them. Last time it had something to do with vray reading bounding boxes, unpacking on the way.

[Dubbie99]

yeah I was reading as a packed disk prim.

[Gosho.Genchev]

Hey all,

It was the case about 6 months ago that indeed, V-Ray was looking up the VDBs before writing the paths to the VRScene. This has been resolved and I can't reproduce the described behavior on my end. Could you please point me to the build number from the V-Ray -> About V-Ray window in Houdini's top menu bar?

Best regards!

[glacierise]

Great, will test that, thanks!

[Dubbie99]

Thanks for the update.
I will double check that I am doing everything right on my end.

[Dubbie99]

As an update, I checked what we were doing here and it turns out we weren't loading properly as a packed prim. Doing it correctly makes it all work very fast as I would expect!

[david.anastacio]

It used to be the case that VDBs were a bit slow even when using packed prims, but this was greatly improved in the last half year. We had a project last year with lots of VDBs and this was pushed into Chaos for improvement and since then things got a lot better in that sense.
Word of advice if I may, try to deploing studio wide defaults for the File node to already be set to read as packed primitives by default, will save you a lot of issues

Best,
David.

[Dubbie99]

Good idea. Thanks David.