Can I tell maya use more cpu & memory?

HitmonInfinity

I'm currently rendering a pretty heavy normal map. It's taking a while, but I'm only seeing 30% of my cpu and about a third of my ram being used. Is there some way to have maya use more resources?

I know you can edit the limits when doing batch bakes and stuff, but I wasn't sure if that applied to Transfer Maps.

Ark

Mayas baking tools aren't multi-threaded, so you'll gain no benefit from multiple cores, with that be said, you can look into the BSP section under the render options and see if you can assign more RAM.

greuh

the issue comes from the mental ray implementation that multithread on a per object basis (there's a tech detail explanation about that on the maya station blog).
Sadly it's not always practical to cut your bake across multiple objects.

you'll get much much faster results with x-normal.

Violet

In Windows, you can assign how many threads the software uses in the task manager. ?

HitmonInfinity

greuh wrote: »

the issue comes from the mental ray implementation that multithread on a per object basis (there's a tech detail explanation about that on the maya station blog).
Sadly it's not always practical to cut your bake across multiple objects.

you'll get much much faster results with x-normal.

Yeah, I hear ya. I use xnormal for ao. I guess it's only one extra step. It's just nice to keep things in maya when it's exploded though

malcolm

The normal map baker in Maya has nothing to do with mental ray as far as I know so you wouldn't see any benefits either way. The ao baking is supposedly multithreaded as it uses mental ray to generate, but it is unusably slow. Have you tried lowering the settings in the normal map bake, I've found upping the settings yield diminishing results vs the time it takes to bake the map.