Maya / renderman / possibly user issues
Hi all,
I'm definitely a newb taking on my first full scene project. I did a rough version of the scene to evaluate geometries and materials and things started to get weird as I added and changed meshes and shaders. Over time, renders started getting MUCH slower and MUCH grainier. Also, with simpler scenes, I can see PRman building the final image sweeping down. Lately, it just looks like its doing nothing with the red blocks stuck. Sometimes after a while it updates the image, sometimes it just crashes. Pushing the settings to compensate caused blue screening pretty reliably.
PC specs:
i7 4 Ghz
16 GB ram
1 TB SSD for app, projects
GTX 980
Was using windows 10 64, Maya 2016, and PRman for M16, now rolled back to 8.1 with Maya 2015
So I definitely googled around for help on this.
The first thing I did was open the polycount display, I believe it was about half a million faces originally. Ok, so I used Reduce cut these down pretty substantially where I could. I don't think it's an issue of faces, per se, but possibly geometry. So I used the clean up to remove errant objects and fix issues, deleting histories each time. The scene used like 5 file textures that were originally random dimensions (they were square though, as I remember non-square textures causing extreme slowness). I resampled these for a power of 8 (either 128x128 or 256x256) as I thought that might help. I deleted anything from the scene that was straight duplicated (I'm doing a restaurant so tables and chairs mainly) and instanced them instead. I tried replacing the environment light (one of only two lights in the scene) with a rectangular area light instead). I trashed the prefs. I constantly Optimized Scene Size and deleted All by Type- History after every change. I also started restarting my computer before every render. I tried turning off or down many of the reflection/shadow settings in the render options, though I don't know what most of them do so stuck to the three presets basically.
None of this really was the magic fix to immediately improve the speed or quality of renders, so I was really baffled. Further, I was getting the "missing node" etc error when opening the file, though it would open seemingly normally. I made a completely new scene with just some primitives and rendered it at the "Production" preset for PRman. Blue screened. At this point I reformatted my system, rolling back to 8.1 and 2015 maya (all was stable before upgrading).
So now, what I've made so far, basic stuff, seems to be rendering ok. I opened up the scene that had issues and it still had issues, resetting my system again.
Anyway, I've started rebuilding the scene since the first one was a dry run, but this needs to eventually be a crisp photorealistic render and I want to make sure I avoid some fatal flaw in settings or my modelling or material use so that it doesn't get all crappy again.
- Do I need more RAM?
- I've been doing file textures by attaching the Maya file node to a PRman shader that accepts it, is this no good?
- Is there some sort of cumulative issue that would cause all of the changes I've been doing (despite deleting histories etc) to fatten the scene somehow and result in the increasingly poor performance?
- Is there some performance-draining setting I might have on for rendering?
- Is it true that the more objects in the scene the more rays you need to get the same level of quality - eg., if I have a primitive that looks pretty good in a simple render, say 512 rays, that wont render the same quality if there are 25 other primitives with the same ray setting?
Jeeze, sorry to write a wall of text but this has been stressing me for a couple of days now. Any insight or help would be most appreciated.
I'm definitely a newb taking on my first full scene project. I did a rough version of the scene to evaluate geometries and materials and things started to get weird as I added and changed meshes and shaders. Over time, renders started getting MUCH slower and MUCH grainier. Also, with simpler scenes, I can see PRman building the final image sweeping down. Lately, it just looks like its doing nothing with the red blocks stuck. Sometimes after a while it updates the image, sometimes it just crashes. Pushing the settings to compensate caused blue screening pretty reliably.
PC specs:
i7 4 Ghz
16 GB ram
1 TB SSD for app, projects
GTX 980
Was using windows 10 64, Maya 2016, and PRman for M16, now rolled back to 8.1 with Maya 2015
So I definitely googled around for help on this.
The first thing I did was open the polycount display, I believe it was about half a million faces originally. Ok, so I used Reduce cut these down pretty substantially where I could. I don't think it's an issue of faces, per se, but possibly geometry. So I used the clean up to remove errant objects and fix issues, deleting histories each time. The scene used like 5 file textures that were originally random dimensions (they were square though, as I remember non-square textures causing extreme slowness). I resampled these for a power of 8 (either 128x128 or 256x256) as I thought that might help. I deleted anything from the scene that was straight duplicated (I'm doing a restaurant so tables and chairs mainly) and instanced them instead. I tried replacing the environment light (one of only two lights in the scene) with a rectangular area light instead). I trashed the prefs. I constantly Optimized Scene Size and deleted All by Type- History after every change. I also started restarting my computer before every render. I tried turning off or down many of the reflection/shadow settings in the render options, though I don't know what most of them do so stuck to the three presets basically.
None of this really was the magic fix to immediately improve the speed or quality of renders, so I was really baffled. Further, I was getting the "missing node" etc error when opening the file, though it would open seemingly normally. I made a completely new scene with just some primitives and rendered it at the "Production" preset for PRman. Blue screened. At this point I reformatted my system, rolling back to 8.1 and 2015 maya (all was stable before upgrading).
So now, what I've made so far, basic stuff, seems to be rendering ok. I opened up the scene that had issues and it still had issues, resetting my system again.
Anyway, I've started rebuilding the scene since the first one was a dry run, but this needs to eventually be a crisp photorealistic render and I want to make sure I avoid some fatal flaw in settings or my modelling or material use so that it doesn't get all crappy again.
- Do I need more RAM?
- I've been doing file textures by attaching the Maya file node to a PRman shader that accepts it, is this no good?
- Is there some sort of cumulative issue that would cause all of the changes I've been doing (despite deleting histories etc) to fatten the scene somehow and result in the increasingly poor performance?
- Is there some performance-draining setting I might have on for rendering?
- Is it true that the more objects in the scene the more rays you need to get the same level of quality - eg., if I have a primitive that looks pretty good in a simple render, say 512 rays, that wont render the same quality if there are 25 other primitives with the same ray setting?
Jeeze, sorry to write a wall of text but this has been stressing me for a couple of days now. Any insight or help would be most appreciated.