Arnold render times increased x3

[Anonymous]

3ds max 2018, latest Arnold update

Recently my renders have doubled/tripled in length for rendering times, I must have pressed a button somewhere which has triggered the render times to increase. It use to take 5 hours to do a 4K render at high settings, but now it takes 4 hours to do a 1080 render at default settings.

I have not updated any software since this started happening, it was a bit out of the blue and I'm really not sure what has caused it. The whole image is consistently time consuming, so it's not slow in a specific area.

I've tried merging everything into a new scene with the default Arnold production render settings, not touching anything and it still takes an unexpected amount of time..

Another issue which may be related is that whenever I do a render overnight and I logout of my PC the render seems to stop at some point so when I login the next morning the render is only about 30% done. Or maybe it's not stopped, it's just running even slower.. However when I do a render during the day while I'm active on the PC it seems run consistently. A few days ago this wasn't an issue, I don't put my PC to sleep, just logout. At this point I'm tempted to just use Active shade as it runs faster for the same quality.. I seems like a Production rendering issue. 

Thanks

Mike

[Anonymous]

3ds max 2018, latest Arnold update

Recently my renders have doubled/tripled in length for rendering times, I must have pressed a button somewhere which has triggered the render times to increase. It use to take 5 hours to do a 4K render at high settings, but now it takes 4 hours to do a 1080 render at default settings.

I have not updated any software since this started happening, it was a bit out of the blue and I'm really not sure what has caused it. The whole image is consistently time consuming, so it's not slow in a specific area.

I've tried merging everything into a new scene with the default Arnold production render settings, not touching anything and it still takes an unexpected amount of time..

Another issue which may be related is that whenever I do a render overnight and I logout of my PC the render seems to stop at some point so when I login the next morning the render is only about 30% done. Or maybe it's not stopped, it's just running even slower.. However when I do a render during the day while I'm active on the PC it seems run consistently. A few days ago this wasn't an issue, I don't put my PC to sleep, just logout. At this point I'm tempted to just use Active shade as it runs faster for the same quality.. I seems like a Production rendering issue. 

Thanks

Mike

[Anonymous]

Maybe this is helpful, this is my system resource monitor while rendering. 

[Anonymous]

Maybe this is helpful, this is my system resource monitor while rendering. 

[madsd]

Sounds realy weird.

I was thinking Thermal Throttle first, cpu overheating and GHZ drops over time.

But we need more intel.

What does your logs say?

Increase verbose level to 5 and stick out some test files.

You find it in the Diagnostic page in the render panel.

Has IT been around you box and done "things" lately?

[madsd]

Sounds realy weird.

I was thinking Thermal Throttle first, cpu overheating and GHZ drops over time.

But we need more intel.

What does your logs say?

Increase verbose level to 5 and stick out some test files.

You find it in the Diagnostic page in the render panel.

Has IT been around you box and done "things" lately?

[Anonymous]

Turns out the Active shade is just as slow... I'm doing another round of optimisations to everything and it seems to be rendering better. I'm not really sure what I've changed..

I also removed any instance objects thinking this maybe also effect render times. I'll keep you updated! Thanks for your response! 

[Anonymous]

Turns out the Active shade is just as slow... I'm doing another round of optimisations to everything and it seems to be rendering better. I'm not really sure what I've changed..

I also removed any instance objects thinking this maybe also effect render times. I'll keep you updated! Thanks for your response! 

[Stephen.Blair]

What version were you using before?

Arnold logs are a must if you want feedback from the Arnold team. We spend lots of time looking at logs, and we know what to look for. At the very least, logs will eliminate all the simple possibilities and tell us that nothing super weird is going on (like a too small texture cache, or tons on non-tx files taking forever to load, or a slow file server that makes texture loading a bottleneck, and so on...)

[Stephen.Blair]

What version were you using before?

Arnold logs are a must if you want feedback from the Arnold team. We spend lots of time looking at logs, and we know what to look for. At the very least, logs will eliminate all the simple possibilities and tell us that nothing super weird is going on (like a too small texture cache, or tons on non-tx files taking forever to load, or a slow file server that makes texture loading a bottleneck, and so on...)

[Anonymous]

I've attached a log, there are some warnings at the bottom but I don't think they should effect the scene too much. Or maybe they do (?)

I've edited the log slightly for security, but most of it's the same.

Render times have improved now I've done some optimisation, but maybe there is something here you can tell me which might be an issue still.

Thanks,

Mike

[Anonymous]

I've attached a log, there are some warnings at the bottom but I don't think they should effect the scene too much. Or maybe they do (?)

I've edited the log slightly for security, but most of it's the same.

Render times have improved now I've done some optimisation, but maybe there is something here you can tell me which might be an issue still.

Thanks,

Mike

[Anonymous]

Here is a more detailed log..

There seems to be some big time discrepancies from 30 minutes, 51 minutes and then 2 hours.

Thanks,

Mike

[Anonymous]

Here is a more detailed log..

There seems to be some big time discrepancies from 30 minutes, 51 minutes and then 2 hours.

Thanks,

Mike

[Stephen.Blair]

Is the render still going? There'll be a summary at the end of the log that can help understand what's going on.

What version of Arnold were you using before? Older than 5.3 ?

[Stephen.Blair]

Is the render still going? There'll be a summary at the end of the log that can help understand what's going on.

What version of Arnold were you using before? Older than 5.3 ?

[Anonymous]

I kept it running and stopped it this morning.. See attached: 

Previous version was 2.57

At the bottom of the log it says 2942 rays/pixel.. I feel this is a lot and probably hindering the time.

Cheers,

Mike

[Anonymous]

I kept it running and stopped it this morning.. See attached: 

Previous version was 2.57

At the bottom of the log it says 2942 rays/pixel.. I feel this is a lot and probably hindering the time.

Cheers,

Mike

[Anonymous]

Render samples are set pretty low, see attached.

Cheers,

Mike

[Anonymous]

Render samples are set pretty low, see attached.

Cheers,

Mike

[Anonymous]

Another log, this one rendered quicker because I hid some meshes. It seems to be mesh/texture related. I removed all the lights and it still took a long time to render.

Cheers,

Mike

[Anonymous]

Another log, this one rendered quicker because I hid some meshes. It seems to be mesh/texture related. I removed all the lights and it still took a long time to render.

Cheers,

Mike

[Stephen.Blair]

Where's the rest of the log? See all the other information in this screenshot:

For testing, set the Camera Samples low, like -3

Then in Render Settings > Diagnostics, enable Ignore Shaders, Textures, Atmosphere, Subdivision, and Displacement.

Does the render still take forever? If not, then start turning them back on, one by one.

I'd be tempted to turn of Atmosphere first and see if that's a problem.

The other approach is what you started: hide parts of the scene until you find what's slowing down the render.

Going from 3.2.57 to 3.2.65 shouldn't cause any slowdown like this. It's just a bug fix update.

You can always rollback to 3.2.57 to test.

[Stephen.Blair]

Where's the rest of the log? See all the other information in this screenshot:

For testing, set the Camera Samples low, like -3

Then in Render Settings > Diagnostics, enable Ignore Shaders, Textures, Atmosphere, Subdivision, and Displacement.

Does the render still take forever? If not, then start turning them back on, one by one.

I'd be tempted to turn of Atmosphere first and see if that's a problem.

The other approach is what you started: hide parts of the scene until you find what's slowing down the render.

Going from 3.2.57 to 3.2.65 shouldn't cause any slowdown like this. It's just a bug fix update.

You can always rollback to 3.2.57 to test.

[Anonymous]

Hey!

Sorry I've taken a while to get back to you, been busy... I have a full log for you I was running on 'debug' and not 'info'...

So I've reduced some texture sizes which were 8 4k textures down to 2k and two 8k textures down to 2k because they didn't need to be so huge and it seems to be performing much better. I hide specifically hid the meshes which had 8K textures and it improved greatly... Take a look at the log encase there is something you can pull from it, is there anything else I could optimise? 

I did remove the atmosphere and it didn't seem to effect anything. The two lights I have are very tiny bulbs which are about 5% of the scene.

Thanks for your help! I haven't made a scene this big using offline rendering so this is very much new to me, never really had issues before..

Cheers,

Mike

[Anonymous]

Hey!

Sorry I've taken a while to get back to you, been busy... I have a full log for you I was running on 'debug' and not 'info'...

So I've reduced some texture sizes which were 8 4k textures down to 2k and two 8k textures down to 2k because they didn't need to be so huge and it seems to be performing much better. I hide specifically hid the meshes which had 8K textures and it improved greatly... Take a look at the log encase there is something you can pull from it, is there anything else I could optimise? 

I did remove the atmosphere and it didn't seem to effect anything. The two lights I have are very tiny bulbs which are about 5% of the scene.

Thanks for your help! I haven't made a scene this big using offline rendering so this is very much new to me, never really had issues before..

Cheers,

Mike

[madsd · Accepted solution]

It's not related, but, you should use maketx.exe to converter your textures to .tx, non of your files are mip tiled. So you will get a lot of init overhead each time texture cache is flushed, or at a fresh reboot.

Once that is done, you can leave the .jpg and .tga files in the slots, and just enabled "Use exsisting .tx" this will pick up the .tx version of the texture despire an unoptimized texture is sitting in the scene. The .tx files just needs to be located same place as the jpg files and so on.

[madsd · Accepted solution]

It's not related, but, you should use maketx.exe to converter your textures to .tx, non of your files are mip tiled. So you will get a lot of init overhead each time texture cache is flushed, or at a fresh reboot.

Once that is done, you can leave the .jpg and .tga files in the slots, and just enabled "Use exsisting .tx" this will pick up the .tx version of the texture despire an unoptimized texture is sitting in the scene. The .tx files just needs to be located same place as the jpg files and so on.

[Anonymous]

Hey!

I didn't realise this was apart of the process, thanks a bunch! After doing some additional research into to this the render times just slashed from 4 hours to 1 hour! The texture cache must have maxed out.

Thanks!

Cheers,

Mike

[Anonymous]

Hey!

I didn't realise this was apart of the process, thanks a bunch! After doing some additional research into to this the render times just slashed from 4 hours to 1 hour! The texture cache must have maxed out.

Thanks!

Cheers,

Mike