topic Re: aiCurvature on GPU??? in Arnold GPU Forum

aiCurvature on GPU???

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Oct 2019 22:25:21 GMT

Hi, is aiCurvature suppose to work in GPU? can't really find a specific answer.

at the moment it freezes maya when I try to use it even on a simple cube.

Re: aiCurvature on GPU???

thiago.ize — Mon, 07 Oct 2019 22:45:46 GMT

https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5ARP/Supported+Features+and+Known+Limitations Says that it is supported, with the exception of using it with trace sets.

When you say it freezes maya, could it be that it's just doing the one time compiling of the GPU shaders? Let it continue for 5 or so minutes. If that doesn't help, see if you can open up the Arnold log so you can see what it's actually doing (make sure to also enable info verbosity level).

Re: aiCurvature on GPU???

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:14:43 GMT

So giving Arnold those 5 minutes did the trick. thank you very much.

But the weird thing is that like it says in the docs, doing the Pre-Populate GPU cache from the Utilities menu should avoid the waiting and I kept thinking that maya was just hanging. So I was restarting it and trying new things for the pas 2 hours. being used to GPU renderer engine, 2 minutes to load a cube there is definitely something wrong or something I'm missing.

They should really update the docs and say that first time render takes 5 minute no matter what you do.

Re: aiCurvature on GPU???

thiago.ize — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:29:32 GMT

The pre-population only does a subset of the most common shader/object combinations. This particular combination is not covered by it. If we handled all combinations the pre-population would take hours. You are definitely right, we should make this more clear in the documentation.

Re: aiCurvature on GPU???

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:51:29 GMT

happy that is working now.. thank you again

Re: aiCurvature on GPU???

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 18:46:21 GMT

I've just realized, does this means that every time I render a new shader combination in GPU it needs to be populated? or is it only for every node used for the first time?

Re: aiCurvature on GPU???

thiago.ize — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 19:01:28 GMT

It's not every node, but only certain nodes that cause this to happen (usually the ones that trace rays, which the curvature shader, ambient occlusion, and a few others do). Since we save these in a cache on your hard drive, it'll become increasingly less likely that you'll need a JIT compile the longer you use this version of Arnold. I suspect you'll only have this slow JIT compile happen maybe at most a few more times for the curvature shader and then you'll be good.

Re: aiCurvature on GPU???

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 19:16:47 GMT

thanks for the explanation. in fact the curvature node still take is time before it starts rendering, but I'm just at day 2 with Arnold.