Maya render only using 10% CPU utilization

[Anonymous]

I need some clarification on CPU support. I have read that maya interactive can only use a single thread, and maya/arnold can use multi cores. However, My render farm is showing roughly 10% CPU utilization when tasked with a very heavy job. I expect to see the processor maxed out at 100% or near...I show no other limiting factors, power option set to high performance, no networking, disk or ram bottlenecks. 

tried looking in the manual and documentation to no avail. Tried setting the render engine to arnold unsuccessfully. 

any advice or insight would be great. I think 90% of my clock cycles are going down the drain. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

I have verified that threads is set to 0 which should unlock all CPUs

[Stephen.Blair]

Let's see an Arnold log...verbosity level Info please.

In Maya:

1. In the Arnold Render Settings, go to the Diagnostics tab.
2. In the Verbosity Level list, click  Info.
3. Click the File check box.
4. Click the folder icon and choose a folder for the Arnold log files.

[Anonymous]

Hello, Is it possible to do this on a machine running thinkbox deadline as a service that starts maya running as a service. Or Do I need to do this as a local render?

Best,

Todd

[Stephen.Blair]

The Deadline submitter lets you set the verbosity level.

[Anonymous]

Hello Stephen, I was able to resubmit a debug version of the shot in question. Only problem is these frames took between 8 and 4 days to render. I'm going to provide the log as it stand now after 35 minutes of rendering. Let me know if you need a full completed task log in order to proceed, and i will render a frame that is less intensive from the same shot.

Attched as .txt

Best,

Todd

[Anonymous]

Additionally, This may not be the best testbed for this ticket. I am rendering on a full blown desktop with high end graphics card etc. and showing significantly higher utilization that i was on our render farm blades. 

high CPU usage on workstation

[Anonymous]

Stephen,

Sorry to spam you! I just talked with a coworker and I was able to get the full render log from the job in question. please disregard previous replies. 

Here is the render log

THANKS!!!!

[Stephen.Blair · Accepted solution]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Stephen,

Sorry to spam you! I just talked with a coworker and I was able to get the full render log from the job in question. please disregard previous replies. 

Here is the render log

THANKS!!!!

---

First, don't ignore these warnings. Too small bounds padding for displacement can give weird results.

WARNING |   [disp] sol_waterBear_rig_rig_main_v020:tardigrade_mouth_GEOShape: padding is at least 10x smaller than it should be! given disp_padding: 0, recommended: 0.xxx-xxxxxxxx

The real problem is the texture cache. It's too small, and a ton of time is spent flushing the cache and reloading texture data (you've got about 27GB of texture data and a 2GB texture cache, and we ended up reading in 50 TB of texture data because we have to keep flushing the cache).

You've got a lot of RAM and the scene didn't use up that much, so I'd be tempted to just set the Max Texture Cache to 32 GB

Also, you might want to try with a newer Arnold in case it's something we fixed.

[Anonymous]

Stephen, Thank you so much for getting back to me. This is excellent news, and gives me something to test. 

I am more on the systems side of things, not the artist side, so I'm a little confused by the padding error. Does that mean maya is requesting the file pad be more digits (ex: _ _ _ _ instead of _ _ )? I can also check with the artist. 

I'm very excited about this new information. I will try it again and post results. 

Cheers!!

[Stephen.Blair · Accepted solution]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Stephen, Thank you so much for getting back to me. This is excellent news, and gives me something to test. 

I am more on the systems side of things, not the artist side, so I'm a little confused by the padding error. Does that mean maya is requesting the file pad be more digits (ex: _ _ _ _ instead of _ _ )? I can also check with the artist. 

I'm very excited about this new information. I will try it again and post results. 

Cheers!!

---

In Maya, select the object, and in the Attribute Editor of the shape you can set the Bounds Padding.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Greetings Stephen!

Let me again thank you for your assistance in this matter. I have increased the texture cache size from a paltry 2048mb to 40960mb (40gb) and the render time has increased dramatically, from 4 days 10 hours to 5 hours. That particular shot was 1200 frames and a savings of 4 days across 1200 frames is incredible. 

Additionally, as I mentioned our storage array is constantly under heavy bombardment, so this will ease some of that strain. 

Again, Thanks so much for working through this issue with me, and this thread can be marked closed. 

Have a great weekend!

Very best!

Todd