slow to start LC

[shadevfx]

Somtimes, and it seems somewhat random... Light Caching seems to start very slowly. The scene wont use very much of the CPU and it will take a minute or more before it begins.

and then sometimes, on the same scene, all CPUs are firing and it starts right away.

Any ideas as to what could cause that?

thanks
Bryan

[shadevfx]

so it seems it is not the LC afterall.. as I disabled GI and am still having very slow starts on some scenes, somewhat randomly.

The scene is local, project set local (to eliminate network issues)

This is rendering from within maya, not standalone... and it just seems to "hang" while getting ready to render the image...

Any newbie mistakes I might be making to cause this? Seems to happen with and without motion blur enabled as well.

Also, is there a way to increase the verbosity of V-ray while rendering in maya to see status reports as to what may or may not be going wrong?

[snivlem]

your not render regioning are you?

For me render region a tiny section of the image is much, much slower than rendering the entire image.

[shadevfx]

nope.... Ive switched to standalone to get better info on what's going on.. It seems to lag right before it hits the first pre-pass phase.

I'm also getting some dynamic memory limit too low errors now... might be related.

If any tech people are reading: is there a flag to set the memory limit?

[vladimir.nedev]

You can increase the dynamic memory limit from
Render Settings -> Settings -> System -> Raycaster Params -> Dynamic Memory Limit.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[shadevfx]

what I meant more specifically was in relation to the stand alone renderer. Is there a command line flag.

Also, is there a disadvantage to setting the memory limit too high?

[vladimir.nedev]

No, there isn't a command line option for the standalone to specify the dynamic memory limit. We may add this in the future though. I think other people have asked about it as well. The limit from Maya's UI will be written in the vrscene file and will be used as the limit in the standalone as well. So you can still specify the limit for the standalone.

The dynamic memory for proxies, subdivision surfaces, etc is only part of the memory that V-Ray uses, so setting the limit too high may not leave enough space for other stuff, like textures, normal mesh geometry that is not proxied, etc. My guess is that setting the dynamic memory limit to be half of the system memory is a good choice. Or maybe even more if you have more than 4GBs of memory. I don't have much experience using it, so I am not sure about this. It also depends on the particular scene, if most of your geometry is proxies and you don't have very big textures, you can set it even higher.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev