Exporting to VRScene advice

[ricoholmes]

Hello,
We're exporting to VRScenes in order to do quick RT previews via standalone over farm, but the save time is becoming a bottleneck and defeating the purpose somewhat.
ie a 300 frame segment is taking an hour to export.

Reasonably geometry heavy scenes using a couple of alembics for fluids and a couple of reference files to keep down the heavy machinery meshes. I understand we can't expect miracles but do you have any pointers/advice that might help us save time on the exports ?

[vlado]

Which V-Ray version are you using? Are you able to provide scenes that we can trouble-shoot?

Best regards,
Vlado

[ricoholmes]

Build 26379 (nightly, but it's been a long standing issue for us).
I can't upload the scenes I'm afraid on this one Heavy NDA.

Updating frame at time xx.xx (press esc to cancel) is where it's taking the longest.
The usual rate of frame update to save is about 12 seconds.
Again, not expecting miracles, but just checking here to see if there's any obvious things I've overlooked (ie: "don't have references, they're expensive")

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Just don't stop the RT . In this way it will send only incremental changes.

[ricoholmes]

Big smile here, but not sure why Possibly because I didn't understand that answer.
Not rendering RT animation from maya gui. Using export to vrscene in the global render dialog, then rendering from vrayStandalone. Farm managed from renderpal.

[ricoholmes]

I think the main frustration comes from being able to save a maya scene in seconds but not have access to CUDA as a "production renderer". Using GPU RT is a dream come true, even if only via vrscenes currently.

[vlado]

I think the main frustration comes from being able to save a maya scene in seconds but not have access to CUDA as a "production renderer".

So if we make the CUDA option to work for regular rendering, that will solve your problem?

Best regards,
Vlado

[ricoholmes]

I'd say in a heartbeat, "yes".
Hold on.. this is a trick, isn't it ?

[vlado]

Hehe, no; we actually tried that, but I remember some issues - they are perfectly solvable of course, just need to focus on it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[ricoholmes]

Having just upgraded all our remaining machines to Cuda, I can't tell you how exciting this is as a prospect.

RT GPU has become such a boon to our workflow that, to be honest, the only scenes we render via CPU are legacy scenes that we can't change for continuity sake. RT GPU has very few caveats remaining (and all faith they'll be adressed in time) to the point that we've accepted workarounds in favor of using GPU as our production renderer. Our current project simply wouldn't have been possible without it, given the delivery deadline we have. (NDA restrictions make external farms a no-no).