Insane render pre-processing time

[Diurno]

Hi all, i'm doing some render with 2013, and with my scene (a lot of geometry), before the render starts, it takes ages to pre-processing... Like 2 minute or so, i see things like "computing camera volume", "prepare this texture to render or so". There is an error with an hopefully fix for this issue?

[Maximus]

Hi all, i'm doing some render with 2013, and with my scene (a lot of geometry), before the render starts, it takes ages to pre-processing... Like 2 minute or so, i see things like "computing camera volume", "prepare this texture to render or so". There is an error with an hopefully fix for this issue?

In my personal experience this happens with MR when you start to have quite a complex scene, unfortunately there isnt much to do.
You could try couple of things like converting all heavy textures to .map (be aware that this is one of the cause of having NaN spots in final renders, the map conversion in MR is bit meh.. sometimes it works sometimes it cant convert correctly all the color data and produces NaN artifacts, reason why i'm very careful on when to use this especially if youse exr/hdri).

Also disable all the log info. They are heavy to show for Mr.

[Kzin]

converting the textures by hand and dont use the buildin feature in the rendersettings!!!
there is something wrong with the tiled option in impf_copy that creates these black squares and the buildin option uses the tile option i think (did some tests with it).

and also use standins instead of saving heavy models in your scene. scene loading and rendering is alot faster. except you are using standins as instances because there are bugs inside of xsi that makes it a pain to use if you instance the standin(s) alot. but single usage of it is ok.

[Diurno]

thanks for the advice. I noticed that what really takes time for preprocessing is the Crowd Simulation. With that off, there is no preprocessing at all. I already used the Cache to bake the crowd animation, there are other ways to make the preprocessing of the Crowd faster? The crowd has no texture, just simple lambert materials.

[fm.illuminatus]

I have the same issue, but worse. If I use final gathering, my renders never get past pre-processing. I've let them go for as long at 24 hours, and besides sucking up a massive amount of RAM, nothing happens. On certain scenes, I can't use final gathering at all because of this. For comparison, the same scene renders with raytracing in about 4-5 minutes. Anyone know what the problem is?

[Maximus]

I have the same issue, but worse. If I use final gathering, my renders never get past pre-processing. I've let them go for as long at 24 hours, and besides sucking up a massive amount of RAM, nothing happens. On certain scenes, I can't use final gathering at all because of this. For comparison, the same scene renders with raytracing in about 4-5 minutes. Anyone know what the problem is?

Yes there was a lot of bugs concering mental ray and final gather, are you on 2012 release? I had this issue coming up quite a lot but never been able to track it down. Sometimes you open the same scene again and it works, sometimes not.
Also check if you are using final gather in "Append" mode, because i remember there was quite some sever bug with that.