slow pass switching

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snowctrl
Posts: 19
Joined: 20 Apr 2012, 12:18
Skype: snowctrl

slow pass switching

Post by snowctrl » 12 Jun 2013, 10:21

Hi there

My current scene is about 1.8million polys, 2000 objects, which are variously divided over 13 different passes. It is my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that Softimage can handle scenes massively more complex than this (I'm running a core i7 4.3Ghz, 16Gb RAM, GeForce 570 etc)

My issue is that switching between the passes has become surprisingly slow - it takes almost 3 minutes!!

This seems to have happened fairly suddenly, but then I did add quite a few passes in quick succession

My question is... is this normal? I'd be grateful if people might share there experiences because this is the first time I've created a scene this complex. Or does it sound like something has gone wrong? If so, is there an easy fix? It's making the scene very cumbersome to work with

All help/views appreciated - I'm using Softimage 2013

Thanks

jON

fabilabo
Posts: 69
Joined: 28 Jan 2010, 13:13

Re: slow pass switching

Post by fabilabo » 12 Jun 2013, 10:57

hi,

i have the same issue, but it happen on lighter scene.
what can i say, from my experience is :
- SI can handle a lot of polygons, but it don't like a lot of objects, then its faster with 1 object with 1 billion of polygons that 1 billion of objects with 1 polygon. Its probably because each object have differents properties, materials etc.
- i found that groups (hiden groups in explorer) and hiden partitions, SI have problems to take both into consideration when you swich passes

Lets try something : if you have some groups for hidden objects, selects object and put it into a hidden partition and delete ALL groups and see if its faster to switch partitions

Hope its clear, thats my experience about it

EricTRocks
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Re: slow pass switching

Post by EricTRocks » 12 Jun 2013, 14:34

Partitions are groups. Having lots of objects with varying visibility and materials in each pass / partition is going to need some computation time when switching passes. I'm not 100% sure but it seems that it is more of a viewport redraw / calculate thing than just simply switching passes.

With my pass manager plugin I resort to muting the viewports and switching that way for some of the operations I need to do which seems to speed things up during script execution.

I've seen this many many times over the years and it really seems it's more about complexity of the partitions, materials on partitions, and visibility of partitions combined with complex / higher poly count scenes.

2 cents.
Eric Thivierge
Lead Kraken Developer, Fabric Engine
http://fabric-engine.github.io/Kraken

snowctrl
Posts: 19
Joined: 20 Apr 2012, 12:18
Skype: snowctrl

Re: slow pass switching

Post by snowctrl » 12 Jun 2013, 17:19

Thanks for your thoughts on this

Actually I found the problem - I had an ICE tree generating a high number of strands - once I deleted this object from the scene, the pass switching speed returned to normal again

I'm not entirely sure why this one object caused the problems it did, but it was a heavy object

jON

EricTRocks
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Posts: 754
Joined: 25 Nov 2009, 01:41
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Re: slow pass switching

Post by EricTRocks » 12 Jun 2013, 17:28

Better question is why do you have a live ICE operator running in a render scene. :P
Eric Thivierge
Lead Kraken Developer, Fabric Engine
http://fabric-engine.github.io/Kraken

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