Updating Frame at time

[waaazoo]

Hello there,

I have again a problem I didn't experience before. Maya 2018 / Vray 3.60.04
Working on an animation, and I want to batch render some test frames.
When I render in directly in Maya it just renders instantly. When I render in batch, it just starts to "updating frame at time ...". For example, if I render frame 1940, it updates frames starting from 1119 which takes a hell of a time!
I suppose it's a known issue and a stupid question but I couldn't find the right answer on any topic, here in forum. There is one topic speaking bout particle systems which should be cached to avoid this issue.
I have no particles, but skinned/animated characters. Do I need to cache them ? Is there a way to avoid to cache them?

[edit] Not sure if it's understandable: I try to render only one frame, not a sequence, but it still updates a lot of frames before the actual frame I want to render in batch. I'm missing anything somewhere probably
Curiously, whenever I render frame 2400 or frame 3265, the "updating frame at" starts around frame 1120. Nothing special starts around this frame... [edit]

I would be really happy for an answer as I'm really close to deadline and loosing a lot of time right now...

cheers

Olivier

[waaazoo]

Update. I throwed out everything from the scene except the cameras and the lights, and it was still the same. Then I reset the render settings to default. This finally removed the issue. I then compared and have put back step by step to "old" render settings and now it works fine. I couldn't find the setting that was producing the issue.... but there was anything in the settings that leaded to have this frame update happening.

[yolov]

Hey there and sorry for the late reply.
In a regular Maya session (with GUI) there's an option to 'render animation only in batch mode' - do you have it enabled by any chance?
What it means is that you can have a range set for animation, for example 1120-2000 and with this option enabled, in a regular Maya session you will render only the current frame when you hit the render button, but not the entire animation. This option is ignored in batch rendering, meaning that in batch V-Ray will render the whole animation, unless otherwise instructed.

Is this by any chance what you're experiencing?

If you're doing command-line batch rendering, there are -s (for start) and -e (for end) flags to specify (or rather override) the animation range, so unless you're using those, then V-Ray will use the entire animation range set for the scene (as will most renderers do for that matter).

[waaazoo]

Hi Yolov,

Thanks for your (late) response.
'render animation only in batch mode' was not enabled.
I'm doing command line batch rendering and I always specify start, end, step, camera, output image, etc...
This 'updating time at frame' is related to DR. It doesn't happen when you don't use distributed rendering. It's probably normal, but it's anoying because it can take quite some time.

[yolov]

OK. I tried a few test runs with what I think is a similar setup, but couldn't get this.
I have animation for frames 10 to 20 in my scene. Then I do render.exe -r vray -s 10 -e 10 <scene> with DR and I only get those scenes translated.
You mentioned before that you reset the render settings and this went away. Could it be something other than DR?

[waaazoo]

Hi Yolov,

I will try to send you a scene.

kind regards,

Olivier