Several issues I experience recently (meshlight in IPR, light lister, etc)

[jasonhuang1115]

Hi,

Here are some of the issues I have experienced recently:

OS: Windows 10 x64, Maya 2017 update 3, Vray 3.52.03

1) I convert some meshes into meshlight. During IPR, if clicking a meshlight in Outliner, it triggers IPR to refresh from scratch. It shouldn't as I only select a meshlight and haven't committed to change any parameters of it.

2) When having Vray Light Lister open, if I change a light's name in either Light Lister or Outliner, the Light Lister goes to blank. I have to relaunch Light Lister to repopulate light list with updated light names.

3) IPR (CPU) takes way longer to start/stop the rendering than regular production render. I do have cache geo/texture on for production render, which does speed up the start of production render. But still, the IPR takes much longer to start the render and take EVEN longer to stop. I didn't put a timer but It's a good 10-15 second, if not longer, to stop the IPR. Can the time spent on start/stop IPR match production rendering (CPU)?

Thanks!

[yolov]

Thanks for the input. Here's some notes, I hope you find them useful:

1) I convert some meshes into meshlight. During IPR, if clicking a meshlight in Outliner, it triggers IPR to refresh from scratch. It shouldn't as I only select a meshlight and haven't committed to change any parameters of it.

This is known and is already on the to-do list for fixing. The cause has been narrowed down to the Hypershade window being open. Is it the same in your case?

2) When having Vray Light Lister open, if I change a light's name in either Light Lister or Outliner, the Light Lister goes to blank. I have to relaunch Light Lister to repopulate light list with updated light names.

I can't seem to reproduce this, would it be possible to send us a screen capture that shows the problem, it would greatly help us in identifying and fixing any potential issues.

3) IPR (CPU) takes way longer to start/stop the rendering than regular production render. I do have cache geo/texture on for production render, which does speed up the start of production render. But still, the IPR takes much longer to start the render and take EVEN longer to stop. I didn't put a timer but It's a good 10-15 second, if not longer, to stop the IPR. Can the time spent on start/stop IPR match production rendering (CPU)?

Do you still have cache geo/texture enabled when you experience this? It should be working with VRay 3.52.

[jasonhuang1115]

Hi yolov,

Thanks for the response.

2) RE: Light Lister, interestingly that as I reboot the machine and reload the scene, I noticed that when doing name change in either Outliner or Light Lister when Vray is not renderning, it's all good. When it's doing IPR (CPU), the first time I changed name in Light Lister, the window when blank. But after I re-launch the Light Lister (while IPR was still going), I didn't get the blank window anymore when changing light's name. I will test it more and record animated gif if that happens again.

3) As I reboot the machine and reload the scene, IPR starts/stops faster. However, with geo/texture cache enabled, the time that IPR takes to start/stop is still longer than regular production rendering. Is there a reason for that? Can the time that takes to start/stop IPR matches regular render?

Thanks!

[yolov]

2) Yes, that would be helpful, since we still can't reproduce it here. You might also want to try a newer stable nightly, in case it's something that we've already fixed.
3) I'll make a note for the devs to look into this, but it would be really helfpul if we knew more about your hardware and scene(s). You also might want to try a recent stable nightly build, since we've been doing improvements in IPR as well.

[jasonhuang1115]

Hi Alex and the team,

RE: 3), I've recorded a gif animation to show the issue.
Hardware: i7-6850k, 256GB RAM. Maya scene: 40 mil polys. In the gif, I exposure down the VFB to intentionally not show the content of the production project.

The 1st render is an ADV render. It is actually after it has done the very first time of geo /texture cache (meaning it's at least the 2nd time I hit the render button after I open the scene). I time it roughly at 24 seconds to start rendering.

The following IPR took about 53 seconds to start (based on when the statistics show up in the upper-right corner of the VFB ).

I didn't time how long it took to stop the ADV or IPR render but it's clear to me that it took much longer to stop IPR than ADV render.

The wish is the scene can start rendering in a shorter time and being stop promptly. And IPR won't take a longer time to start/stop.

[jasonhuang1115]

Hi Yolov and devs,

Just wanted to bump this up and see if you get a chance to check the animated gif I uploaded.

Thanks!

[yolov]

Hey, sorry I didn't answer earlier.
Yes, we do got an idea of what you mean and yes, although the caches work for IPR, it still is slower to start up than the production renderer and slower to end the rendering. We've notified the devs and will have to wait for them to look into this and figure out if there's room for improvement and /or if there are any bugs that prevent better performance. I'll make sure to notify you when we have any news.

[jasonhuang1115]

Thank you Yolov. Hope to hear some good news if this can be improved or addressed.