Speeding up my Vray workflow OSX

V-Ray V-Ray for Maya General
1

Hi, I’m looking for some advice about speeding up my vray rendering workflows.

I’m working on a short film with around 40 shots built in maya (2012) and to be rendered in vray.
I’m working on 2/3 mac pro’s (OSX 10.6.8. The project is HD and I’m having real issues with my day to day workflow. Tweaking renders is just taking way too long with vray, and i am spending all day twiddling my thumbs waiting for texture and lighting tweaks and no time actually working. I have tweaked the vray settings and found the fastest GI settings. The renders look great, however if i carry on like this it’s going to take a year! I’m working in linear colourspace and the scenes are mainly architectural in feel, although there is some animation too.

As far as i can see i have 3 options:

1. Build all my textures in viewport 2.0 with maya shaders, push this as far as i can go, use maya lights for speed then change all the lights and shaders to vray right at the end. Does any one use this method or is it lunacy?

2. Try to get vray RT up and running. Maybe I need a new graphics card? So far the Vray RT never seems to update, or takes ages. Using the IPR/ Vray pop up seems to be very unreliable, even with CPU rendering, and my ATI radeon HD 5770 doesn’t seem do give me any GPU rendering. Am i doing something wrong? Should i get a quadro or 5870?

3. Buy a new machine. Is OSX a no- no with Vray? Would i get much more speed from an HP z600/ z800/ z820? Or will i just be in the same situation?

can anyone advise on any of these (or all)? any help would be much appreciated

2

It would be useful if you can get us an example of what kind of scenes you are dealing with to vraymaya@chaosgroup.com

Best regards,
Vlado

3

1. Build all my textures in viewport 2.0 with maya shaders, push this as far as i can go, use maya lights for speed then change all the lights and shaders to vray right at the end. Does any one use this method or is it lunacy?

That would be a no. Viewport 2.0 is very limited, don’t expect it to give you proper result. Using maya lights will also do the same, i.e you will get different result with vray lights. If you literally are waiting for each render a long time, here is a couple of things you can do:

- Identify what is causing the slowdown. Is it large amount of geometry? large amount of textures? displacements? slow network speed? etc.

- After you know what is causing your render to be long, you can take measures to speed them up:

If you have a large amount of textures, you may benefit from using tiled exrs. Tiled exrs optimize the sizes of the textures based on the distance from camera, so for further objects the load smaller tiles, thus render much faster. Alternatively, you can make re-sized versions of your current textures, for example how we used to do this before tiled exrs came around was create a source folder with original maps, and make 3-4 folders with re-sized maps, like 1k, 2k, 3k, 4k…and then switch them in the scene with a script.

For large amounts of geometry see if you are running out of ram, if ram is fine, but its the pre-render export that takes a lot of time, perhaps turning them into proxies will speed things up.

2. Try to get vray RT up and running. Maybe I need a new graphics card? So far the Vray RT never seems to update, or takes ages. Using the IPR/ Vray pop up seems to be very unreliable, even with CPU rendering, and my ATI radeon HD 5770 doesn’t seem do give me any GPU rendering. Am i doing something wrong? Should i get a quadro or 5870?

vray rt is still being developed, and I am not sure what sort of support they have for mac’s, but in my experience rt seems to be less stable.

3. Buy a new machine. Is OSX a no- no with Vray? Would i get much more speed from an HP z600/ z800/ z820? Or will i just be in the same situation?

What kind of machine do you have now? problem is if you have a mix of mac’s and pc this will create extra overhead for you in terms of management. I also read somewhere that render results vary between mac’s and pc, but Vlado would be able to better clarify that statement.

Few years ago I had invested into a xeon workstation, it has 12 physical cores (2 6 core cpus) 24 gb of ram, ssd drive, nvidia card etc. While it was expensive (5.5K) it was well worth the money, you know computers depreciate like crazy, and this machine performs very well even some years later. These days though, I would probably go for a powerful i7. The reason I prefer pc over mac for work, is they are much cheaper in maintenance and you get more bang for your buck.

4

Have a read through this as well, it’s very technical but you can understand a lot of things it translates well into getting better settings for V-Ray where it can get to the point where it is not only faster, but much cleaner rendering as well in some cases.

http://interstation3d.com/tutorials/vray\_dmc\_sampler/demistyfing\_dmc.html

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Thanks so much for the reply.

I’m using 2 8core mac pro’s and a quad core mac pro. The problem applies to pretty much every scene i work on in vray, even pretty basic scenes with just a few shapes and hdri vray dome lights, etc.

I have researched for about 4 months on/off into optimising renders. The render settings/ speed i’m happy with. I just leave it overnight and it looks great. It’s just the day to day workflow- tweaking lights, shaders and settings, which i’m having problems with.

Yesterday i persisted with RT and i must say it shows the potential to be amazingly useful. If you keep trying- restarting IPR a few times, wiggling a few settings (eg distributed rendering on/off) it’s great. However on my set up it works about 70% of the time. Regularly i get the ‘warning:scene is empty’ or ’ (****) no image writer specified ’ or ‘host (**** not responding)’ and then it works, then it doesn’t, then a black screen. I’m loathed to start a long project with this kind of instability.

I’ve set up distributed rendering and it seems to A) slow down renders (?) and b) cause renders to hang without error messages + c) taking up WAY too much of my time. I’d love to use the benefits of this but OSX seems to always lose out to windows with ease of DR use (same goes for mental ray satellite). For example, why can’t the DR manager find available CPU’s?

I’ll definitely try the tiled exr’s thing- i guess my hdri env maps are the only huge files i’m using so they must be affecting things. Maybe this could be the root of my problems? I’ll look into it.

One thing i’m interested in is the network speed. Could i be seeing some kind of licensing issue with client/slave? If so that’s really annoying. I must admit things have started to really slow down once i started to mess with DR.

As for the mac/pc thing. Yes i’m v afraid of the mac /pc network scenario. Texture maps, file paths, etc. I agree- I don’t want to be managing networks, i want to be creating images! However if vray runs stable, and fast, on an hp z820 i’d happily buy one just to get out of this rut!! The mac 12 cores are much cheaper now, so that is an option, but if vray runs faster on a PC then i’m happy to jump ship…

6

Ah ok. If it helps:

I like to use the Nederhurst settings for final renders with brute force as primary and very low light cache as secondary making sure retrace threshold is disabled then sampling of 1-100.

This way I can fire off extremely quick drafts that are noise as hell, but I can have all my lights and get an idea of how everything is going.

So I’m basically just globally controlling V-Ray via three attributes AA/Noise threshold, Adaptive Amount and Global Subdivs.

Maybe if you putt noise threshold at like 1, Adaptive amount at 1 (or close too), then lower the global subdivs and use brute force it could actually be quick rendering? (Brute force as opposed to irradiance mapping as I find it too slow and messy for drafts, but that’s just me)

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Cool thanks…

Yup i’ve tried the Nederhurst settings too, it is handy to bring it all down to three settings. I haven’t tried doing drastic reductions though, i’ll give it a go.

I’ve actually had the best results so far using light cache as primary and secondary… no particular logic to it but on my current project it’s way faster and less noisy. Also I’ve found you get a pretty good idea of what’s going on from the prepasses. But on a 1920x1080 render i’d rather get the optimum settings and tweak with RT, that would be my preferred scenario, if i could just get it a bit more stable!

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The first and the second are not real issues.
Only the last is an issue (‘host … not responding’). This means that the V-Ray standalone used for RT has crashed, most of the times.
Is it possible to isolate it to a particular scene or this problem happens at random with all scenes?

Also what V-Ray and Maya versions are you using?

/Teodor

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I’m using 2.20.01 (snow leapord) and maya 2012. Vray core version 2.00.01

I’ve never had RT running completely smoothly. I’m now having a problem with relatively simple scenes hanging on renders. I changed my network settings to try and get DR up and running and this seems to have caused some other problems.

10

We also did quite a few fixes for the nightly builds (and the stable builds on the nightly builds server), so it may make sense to look into them.

Best regards,
Vlado

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hi how do i access nightly builds?

thanks

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You can email us to vraymaya@chaosgroup.com and our support guys will sort it out. If you still have issues, please email me directly to vlado@chaosgroup.com

Best regards,
Vlado

13

Hi Guys

Just an update on my progress, in case there’s any other OSX users out there. I’ve installed the latest snow leapord nightly build and have already seen a big improvement. I believe the issues i was having were with a) rendering regions and b) using nurbs elements in IPR - both of which appear to have been fixed. However it might have been other things.

The RT seems much more stable, I’m using the gpu and so far it’s great (shame it can’t do viewport subdivision as i use subd preview quite a bit, but lets not get greedy). It seems to be really transforming my workflow so far. Fingers crossed…

Also I don’t know why but i’m seeing a vast improvement in the distributed rendering. Suddenly it works. All 3 machines going, my render times have gone down from 2.48 per frame to 1.06. I have upgraded my network set up so that it’s much faster, and also i’m using light cache for my GI, which seems to make a difference - i guess because you can use 1 thread per pass, so you can share it accross all machines?

It’s a shame I have to set the render slaves manually in the terminal. It just won’t recognise them when i register them as slaves on installation. I have to go back and make ammendments to the setvrlservice, then it works. I really don’t like having to do this as I’m no programmer- so every time something goes wrong i have to get the manual out (which is not very strightforward at the best of times) and go through the steps for setting the ip address and port. That’s my main issue so far with DR. I guess what would be really handy would be a seperate Client installer and a seperate Slave installer… ie, you just double click to install client on the dongle machine and slave on all other machines and everything is set up and ready to go.

Although the fact that it actually works is really exciting!!!

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Can you explain a bit more what additional set up is necessary? Ideally we would also like to make this as fluid an experience as possible.

Other than that, good to hear that things work better now :slight_smile:

Best regards,
Vlado

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Just realised my reply never showed up. My issues are really with the general user operability of vray installations in osx. The unix executable files are a bit clunky. For vrayslave, for example, these files don’t seem to be able to run from startup like other osx apps. So you have to manually go into the bin folder and run them.

It would be great if you could have an easy way to set up vrayslaves on each machine without having to type any code. ie you click an installer icon and it installs, and you hey presto have an app which you can put in the start up items for vray slave, like the vrlservice.

Also it would be great if you could have a browse feature in the distributed rendering dialogue. ie it searches for available slaves. For someone like me it takes me an afternoon to find out what my computer’s IP address is!

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Thanks, will see what can be done about it.

It would be great if you could have an easy way to set up vrayslaves on each machine without having to type any code. ie you click an installer icon and it installs, and you hey presto have an app which you can put in the start up items for vray slave, like the vrlservice.On all other OSes, this is what you can do right away without anything special (i.e. create a shortcut to the V-Ray DR spawner in the Startup folder or whatever). Beats me why Mac OS X always needs special treatment even for such simple things :slight_smile:

Also it would be great if you could have a browse feature in the distributed rendering dialogue. ie it searches for available slaves. For someone like me it takes me an afternoon to find out what my computer’s IP address is!You can use computer names too, not just IPs.

Best regards,
Vlado

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Yes i guess it’s just that they stick out a bit on osx when they have the ‘exec’ icon… they don’t seem like apps you trust :slight_smile:

As for the computer names, etc, DR works a treat when it’s set up. I now use computer names. But i was ignoring it for about 3 months, and missed out on a whole lot of render power, just because you had to set up the slaves, etc in the terminal, and after a few hours of nerding I would give up. If you didn’t have to set them up like that i’m sure a lot of users like me would start a lot sooner with DR and all the power it gives you…

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Hi -
Apologies, it is possible to load vrayslave on startup. I don’t know why it wasn’t working on a previous build, i think i had changed the extension. But it loads on startup now.

thanks

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What kind of machine do you have now? problem is if you have a mix of mac’s and pc this will create extra overhead for you in terms of management. I also read somewhere that render results vary between mac’s and pc, but Vlado would be able to better clarify that statement.

I’m running a Mac OS X Mountain Lion host and rendering with Windows 7 and CentOS Linux slaves and it works fine in the recent nightlies. The automatic asset transfer works perfectly and there are no differences in render buckets between any of the platforms. It’s flawless.

vray rt is still being developed, and I am not sure what sort of support they have for mac’s, but in my experience rt seems to be less stable.

RT GPU is not as stable as RT CPU mode, which works fine in OS X. You get support for more shader networks and stuff in CPU mode so I just gave up on using a GPU with V-Ray until it has support for enough stuff to use in place of the CPU mode.

If you are having problems with a slave service loading, it’s most likely either died during render (rare) or you just installed it and it didn’t load automatically after installation. I don’t have issues with slaves loading but you have to make sure you type “yes” when doing the terminal installation and it asks you if you want to enable it as a service. But that’s par for the course - Linux, Windows and Mac OS X behave the same in that regard.

Bertjenkins - here is a simpler solution for you to run a slave manually from an OS X terminal if you have to. open the terminal and type this and hit enter:

echo "alias slave='/Applications/ChaosGroup/V-Ray/Maya2013-x64/bin/vrayslave'" >> ~/.bashrc

If you are using a different version of V-Ray for Maya (2012, 2011, etc), change the Maya version there.

After opening a new terminal, you can just type “slave” to run the service in case it’s not running. Much easier than typing the full path every time. If you need to edit that file to update the path for a different version in the future, you can open the file in TextEdit.app to avoid having to use a command line text editor:

open -a /Applications/TextEdit.app/ ~/.bashrc

open works like a double click on a file in the Finder

20

Brilliant

Thanks Beige. Works a treat. I had the slave running on my other two mac pros at startup before, but that’s a much easier way to start and stop it quickly. Just out of interest, what’s your prefferred nightly build at the mo? I use snow leapord (maya2012) , and there don’t seem to have been many new builds for ages for osx? Or was i looking in the wrong place?

I’m absolutely loving Vray RT currently. Can’t imagine being without it. I use CPU, but i still have a few qualms with RT. I might as well put them up here in case any clever people at chaos group decide to instantly fix them! Apologies if you’ve heard it all before…

1. Some geometry renders fine but seems to freeze up (or slow down insanely) the initial RT initialization. Seems to happen more if you work in maya render view. I do a lot of stuff with smooth mesh preview and i’m guessing it could be a subdivision issue.

2. The warnings ‘scene is empty’ and ‘Cant write image file .png’, ‘render is not re-entrant’ are kind of annoying, they don’t really explain what the problem is- it seems like i’m constantly drawing red render region squares until something happens. I think a little more useful feedback in the script editor would encourage you to sit and wait a little longer for things to warm up. Often there’s not a problem, but you end up giving up because nothing is happening.

3. Vray render buffer. Sorry, but the integration is extremely annoying. I’ve reverted to using maya’s IPR because a can’t stand all these windows floating around and popping up. And why cant you fire a render from a specific camera? Or fire a new IPR wihtout having to go back to the maya render buffer? Quite regularly i make massive tweaks to my lights and completely change my scene before realising i forgot to press the srgb button. (arrgh) And the scene detail stamp cuts off a good part of the image, kind of annoying.

Right that’s it. Phew it feels good to get that off my chest!