How IR is used to be interactive

[Nigan]

ATTN: THIS THREAD WAS STARTED BY A SPAMBOT, BUT IT RESULTED IN A REASONABLE DISCUSSION, SO I WILL LEAVE IT.
ORIGINAL POST: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=18091.0
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTN.

Hello everyone,,

Since I fully switched over to Corona around 18 months ago I’ve always relied heavily on the Interactive Renderer to fine-tune materials/lighting etc etc. I’ve even used it ‘live’ in client meetings to get real-time feedback and critique. It was flawless around 1 year ago, probably around version 1.4 if I had to guess.

I’m not sure when it stopped working fluidly but IR is now becoming useless for anything but the simplest of scenes. I have plenty of RAM to handle the scale and complexity of my interiors but I find myself waiting constantly for updates and restarts when performing the simplest of changes to my scenes. Often I have to zoom in/out to keep IR ticking over, otherwise it just fails to interactively update.

I haven’t gone as far as submitting bug reports just yet but I was curious to know if any other users have noticed IR becoming slower and less interactive recently?

(Corona Camera or Camera Mod always used as I know there are issues with Physical Cam)

[rowmanns]

Hi,

Please can you provide some scenes/videos of the behaviour which you are describing?

Often I have to zoom in/out to keep IR ticking over, otherwise it just fails to interactively update.

For this do you have your Interactive Rendering Max passes set to something? If it is set to a non 0 number then the IR will stop rendering when it reaches that amount of passes. I'd suggest setting this to 0 if you want your IR to continiously refresh. It's found in Render setup -> Performance -> Interactive Rendering.

Thanks,

Rowan

[clemens_at]

for me ironically it was v3 when it got worse.
"Improved IR performance keeps everything smooth and snappy." was said to be one of the features which was kind of true but something else changed with it. I dont know what it is though.

[Juraj]

For me it's on scene by scene basis. Imho there are a lot of 3dsMax features (modifiers,etc..) that just don't play nice, but I can't really identify which..

[Frood]

Top IR slowdowns for me so far:

- ForestPack (with referenced camera in any object and using this cam in IR of course)
- ForestPack (using point cloud display, general viewport slowdown so also affecting IR)
- ForestPack (which starts to generate meshes even when objects are hidden sometimes) Mystery SOLVED!
- GrowIvy (without EditMesh on top)
- Scene statistics (shortcut "7") in combination with Laubwerk objects
- Scene using Sun&Sky: Just setting a key (Shift-RMB on time or date, autokey on) restarts IR
- <insert_any_additional_finding_here_please!>


Good Luck



Edit: Added third ForestPack issue
Edit: Added keying restart issue, tagged FP mesh generation for hidden FP objects as "solved" :)

[Juraj]

Yeah list would be great because I for example don't use any of the above even :- )

[danio1011]

I too have noticed a big slowdown in IPR, especially with Forest Pack.  I actually thought it might have been due to Forest Pack updating, particularly the big update where they made it so you could 'live edit' during IPR.

More specifically:

I notice Forest Pack point clouds slow down IPR massively.  Changing to a pyramid proxy helps a bit.

I also notice that base surfaces that are scattered on that have modifiers like FFD can really slow things down when using Forest Pack and IPR.  Collapse the base surface to an editable poly and it speeds up some.

[lupaz]

I'm not sure if there's a difference with previous Corona versions (I'm using v4), but Railclone with IR is unusable with their default suggested settings. I assumed it's a Itoosoft problem. I wrote on their forum and this is their response:

"Well, when using the Corona Renderer, in case of "Roofing styles", the Use Instancing Engine option is by default disabled because of Material / UVW XForm Operators are used and these are just partially supported (as you can see in the Feature Compatibility table) - to get these working correctly with the Corona Renderer, the Use Instancing Engine should be switched off.

Please feel free to turn the Use Instancing Engine option ON (attaching screen-shot) which will improve the performance, just take in mind that Material / UVW XForm Operators will have no effect on instanced geometry."

Even with Use Instancing Engine the performance in IR is not the same as when I convert it to geometry.

[davemahi]

Sadly I feel the same. using it just now, and it does not feel very "interactive"

You need to have the most basic scene for it to really be useful.

[Bormax]

I have problem with parsing time in scenes with proxies and animation. In this case parsing time takes muuuch longer time and slows down IR really much.

I've posted about that in 2017

Hi

It looks like I found the problem point. Quite often I have simple animation for the sun for different cameras, and I've noticed that if I don't change frame number I get few second of parsing, if I change frame, parsing time grows. Finally I found that the problem is in proxies, actually in Enable animation of them. Even if the proxy was created as not animated, this checkbox has influence on parsing time.

Example file uploaded with private uploader 1486622037_box-proxy.zip

Simple scene with only one proxy - box, subdivided to rise polycount. Open it and start render - parsing time is 0, change frame - parsing time 2 sec. Check Enable animation on, don't change frame - parsing time 0 sec, change frame - parsing time 2 sec again.
In big scenes it's also dramatically slows down feedback time of IR

I made the same tests with proxies of trees, there I've got difference like 2 sec - 21 sec (worst result). Probably more proxies in the scene - bigger difference of parsing time.
Is it a bug, or some problems on my side?

Just opened the same box scene, tried it now and got 4 sec parsing time instead of 2 sec which I had 2 years ago.

If you have the same problem, please check this topic where iancamarillo shared his script which is disabling animation of selected proxies, maybe it could help you
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,14716.msg94544.html#msg94544

[danio1011]

Is this something where some (or all) of us experiencing a slowdown with iToo software and IPR should file bug reports?  Or is this thread enough for it to get the attention of the Corona team?  I feel like this has been mentioned a number of times on the forum but never gets any traction, maybe because they need specific scenes to test.  That said, I'm finding IPR to be slow with forest pack on most\all scenes these days so I can't imagine user provided scenes really help. 

Anyway, just hoping that this issue gets some love and wondering what needs to be done to make that happen...

[Frood]

What should happen is: Bug report, yes. Personally I'm quite bored about FP + Corona issues because they exist and mutate since ever. 1 bug fixed, 1 new surfacing. And I sometimes don't get who's QA is doing what exactly.

I can only guess that "processing hidden FP objects" is an Itoo issue, maybe even a 3ds Max one. But I'm not going to report it because I'm not using the newest plugin version (which would cost me a lot of time to update because of that crazy deployment procedure for a centralized, network based FP version), I'm not using the current 3ds Max version and I don't want to report to Itoo, Render Legion and Autodesk at once just to read from everybody that they are sorry but it's the fault of someone else (if I ever get some feedback from certain you-know-who-companies that is.).

And the issue with referenced cameras: This is not directly solvable anyway imho because it works like it should: changing the view rebuilds and optimizes the FP objects or rotates billboards. In case of IR I cannot say if the Corona team is even able to block those. It may also be unwanted in many cases that you do not get in IR what you would see in the final render and who can/should/has to react to, say a "freeze all Forest objects" or "Disable object" option inside FP?

The whole thing takes place in a triangle with complex software involved, so it's not exactly easy :) Anyway, you can have amazingly fast IR scenes full of (FP) vegetation currently with an even more amazing IR recover time if you don't fall in any of those traps.


Good Luck

[rowmanns]

Hi,

We certainly want to address these issues.

I am aware of previous reports of slowdowns with some third party plugins including Forest Pack Pro. I'd like to ask if these issues are still present with the latest version of FP and Corona? If they are then I'd definately like a copy of the scene so I can investigate. If not then it is possible that they were resolved along the way.

So from here, if possible could you either report the bugs to support (with one bug report per ticket) or here on the forum (again with one bug per report) and we will investigate them. It would also be of a great help if you could provide scenes of where you are experiencing the issues

Thanks,

Rowan

[lupaz]

Since this thread isn't exclusively about FP...:

Please, take a look at how IR was working here:

Go to minute 6:30 for example.

It used to show some pixels first and gradually increment the amount. But the first appearance of pixels was rally fast.

Now, If I turn IR Subsampling to 0 the first pixels take a couple of seconds to show up in a, say, 1 million poly scene. Yes, the image has more pixels than on the video above, but I don't think it helps at all.

(Why IR subsampling at zero? I hate those huge pixels that delete the previous image. Anyone likes it?)

[PROH]

I hate them too, and often sets Subsampling to 0 like you describe.

[Frood]

We certainly want to address these issues.

This one is from 02/2018 for example. There has been absolutely no movement. You even do not need any special scene to reproduce, so have fun.


Good Luck

[felicialee]

It is indeed helpful:

I too have noticed a big slowdown in IPR, especially with Forest Pack.  I actually thought it might have been due to Forest Pack updating, particularly the big update where they made it so you could 'live edit' during IPR.

More specifically:

I notice Forest Pack point clouds slow down IPR massively.  Changing to a pyramid proxy helps a bit.

I also notice that base surfaces that are scattered on that have modifiers like FFD can really slow things down when using Forest Pack and IPR.  Collapse the base surface to an editable poly and it speeds up some

Moderator's note - removed spam links.

[maru]

Guys, if you have scenes where IR used to work fine in an older version, and now is working worse, please:
-Explain in which exact version of Corona it used to work better
-Explain in which version it works worse
-Contact us either in this forum thread, or start a new one, or use this contact form: https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/new
We will then let you know about further steps.

Thanks in advance.

[lupaz]

Hi Maru,

At least in my case, I don't and can't have different versions installed to actually test this. You probably do, right?
Isn't it just a matter of you testing and then telling us there are no differences or there are indeed differences?

[lupaz]

Actually it would be really interesting and fun to see the difference between version 1.4 and forward, no?

[maru]

Hi Maru,

At least in my case, I don't and can't have different versions installed to actually test this. You probably do, right?
Isn't it just a matter of you testing and then telling us there are no differences or there are indeed differences?

Actually it would be really interesting and fun to see the difference between version 1.4 and forward, no?

Hi Lupaz,

I never requested users to try their scenes with different versions of Corona. We only need user scenes, because the test scenes we create are usually much different than the ones users create in real production.
So if you have a scene which you see that is working super slow (or at least not as fast as expected) - let us know.
If you have a scene which you remember worked great in an older version of Corona, but it works much worse now - even better. Let us know too.

Once we have a scene, we will open it in different versions of Corona and Max, and will see if we are able to reproduce the slowdown, and what are the differences on our hardware.

There could be various issues here. Of course it could be some kind of regression in Corona. But it could as well be:
- User error
- Specific hardware / software combo issue
- Actual change in the scene (e.g. if a user forgot he changed some render setting, which made IR slower)

So if you ever spot something working incorrectly in Corona, please report it to us. It definitely should not take more than 2 minutes, and in case we need more info, we will just contact you: https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/new

[lupaz]

Thanks Maru.

"Super slow", "remember"...it's very subjective.

I don't think the issue people are talking about is a specific case.

I think it's just the doubt to whether you are sure or not that we are using the fastest Corona IR ever.

If you need a scene I can send you one, but if you have a scene someone sent to you a few years ago and do some testing with it with Corona 1.5 and 4.1, wouldn't that work the same way?
I see these comparisons all the time with Fstorm with that crappy kitchen scene. They had the same scene since the beginning.

[Bormax]

One thing I noticed actually with any scene I work with. During the work on some project I bring a lot of different assets to the it's scene to try different variants of them (I suppose it's pretty common workflow). Of course, scene gets heavier and more complex because I keep many different objects in it until the final setup will be found, which slows the rendering, especially all pre-phases. It's kinda clear why it happens in such a heavy scene. But after I clean my scene keeping only the objects which are going to be involved in final rendering, rendering process doesn't get faster - pre-phases take about the same time, and it means that IR's respond doesn't get faster as well.
Simple trick I use to make IR works smoother is bring all objects from the current scene to the new empty scene. From my experience I get about 10-15% shorter final pictures render times for interior scenes, for exterior scenes difference is not so big. If we are talking about pre-phases they take 50-70% shorter time which makes IR muuuch more responsive and smoother.

[Juraj]

One thing I noticed actually with any scene I work with. During the work on some project I bring a lot of different assets to the it's scene to try different variants of them (I suppose it's pretty common workflow). Of course, scene gets heavier and more complex because I keep many different objects in it until the final setup will be found, which slows the rendering, especially all pre-phases. It's kinda clear why it happens in such a heavy scene. But after I clean my scene keeping only the objects which are going to be involved in final rendering, rendering process doesn't get faster - pre-phases take about the same time, and it means that IR's respond doesn't get faster as well.
Simple trick I use to make IR works smoother is bring all objects from the current scene to the new empty scene. From my experience I get about 10-15% shorter final pictures render times for interior scenes, for exterior scenes difference is not so big. If we are talking about pre-phases they take 50-70% shorter time which makes IR muuuch more responsive and smoother.

I wonder (Because I never tried it and measured it), do those cleaner plugins help with that at all or this is something that user cannot reach within 3dsMax, the internal "crap".

I used to do this (transfer to new clean scene) many years ago when 3dsMax 2013/14 used to have all those awful file-increasing issues, but never since. I think it would be good to try myself since I work on some scenes for months and maybe this could give them new life.

[cecofuli]

Look at the first prototype or Corona IR (4-3 years ago).

As you can see, I think the technology behind the IR changed a lot from release to release.
At the beginning, Corona IR doesn't support the Subsampling.
and, I don't know, the old version looks more "fluid" to my eyes.
 I don' like the Subsamplig when I work, because I hate to see "huge pixel".
They distract me very much. I use it almost at 1, even if the update is not so responsive.

Honestly, I liked more the first version of IR, where, the new pixels were blended to the previous pixels.
That do you think?

t=138s

[maru]

Thanks everyone for the feedback. According to our initial (very simple) tests, it seems that:
- IR really used to be faster / more responsive in Corona versions from 1.0 to 1.5 (with 1.4 feeling particularly fast)
- It got a bit worse in the general "feeling" with 1.6 where subsampling was introduced (the pixelation of IR at the beginning)
- In V4 it feels pretty much the same as in 1.6
Note: this is a result of an INITIAL, SIMPLE test. We will investigate this further and will inform you about our findings.

[pokoy]

Hmm, subjectively I feel that IR got a tad slower, then again we asked for (and got) so much new stuff that it maybe had an impact on parsing and refresh times.

One thing that I absolutely hate is how when you are in IR and switch POV and then paint a region, all the pixels outside of the region revert back to the old IR content instead of showing the subpixel content of the new POV. This is something I didn't understand from the beginning, imo it should just display the unfinished result instead.

[Nejc Kilar]

Hmm, subjectively I feel that IR got a tad slower, then again we asked for (and got) so much new stuff that it maybe had an impact on parsing and refresh times.

One thing that I absolutely hate is how when you are in IR and switch POV and then paint a region, all the pixels outside of the region revert back to the old IR content instead of showing the subpixel content of the new POV. This is something I didn't understand from the beginning, imo it should just display the unfinished result instead.

Indeed, I find this a bit bothersome too. :) I manually click clear each time that happens just so I can have a better idea of what is going on in that particular camera angle...

Excited that Maru confirmed the team will look into the IR btw :) Yay!

[lupaz]

@Maru: That's great. Hopefully we'll get a boost.

[lupaz]

Hi Maru,

I was wondering if there were more tests done.
Any further findings?

Thanks.

[Benjamin_F]

Hello,

check out Prism, developed by Mill Film. It's a good reference for speed, responsiveness, under sampling even in very heavy scenes.
https://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2019/video/_/S9197/s9197-prism-and-rtx.mp4

I really hope that the max team will fully implement USD into Max, and Hydra will be supported too.

[arqrenderz]

Hello,

check out Prism, developed by Mill Film. It's a good reference for speed, responsiveness, under sampling even in very heavy scenes.
https://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2019/video/_/S9197/s9197-prism-and-rtx.mp4

I really hope that the max team will fully implement USD into Max, and Hydra will be supported too.

Wow thats some immpressive viewport, about autodesk, lol they havent seen this, nor they care...

[agentdark45]

Hello,

check out Prism, developed by Mill Film. It's a good reference for speed, responsiveness, under sampling even in very heavy scenes.
https://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2019/video/_/S9197/s9197-prism-and-rtx.mp4

I really hope that the max team will fully implement USD into Max, and Hydra will be supported too.

Goddamn! Really makes you wonder what the hell Autodesk are doing with their 9823523 employees.

[Jpjapers]

Goddamn! Really makes you wonder what the hell Autodesk are doing with their 9823523 employees.

Have a look at blender 2.8 and youll be even more annoyed

[sprayer]

Goddamn! Really makes you wonder what the hell Autodesk are doing with their 9823523 employees.

they are buying plugins and software and abandon development)

By the way Ubisoft start using blender for animation, and autodesk starting to sell licences for indi because of that

[David Males]

Hi guys,

speaking from my own recent experience, I personally had quite an issue with IR in Corona 4. It was so annoying I just downgraded to C3hf2 for that reason, maybe it was due to some things still being on legacy settings, but as I needed it to work afap I just decided to finish the project in C3 instead..  I spent almost whole week trying out what the culprit was, couldn't identify it (re-saving layer by layer etc.)..  But it was really very very unresponsive, like waiting several minutes for IR to start reacting every time I moved the camera or changed any settings, and I still had a lot of RAM available..

Although I think it may have been due to quite heavy CoronaDistanceMap usage in mix with the CoronaScatter and proxies? Maybe that is something you could try to recreate to investigate this further, like a lot of various object/proxies in distance maps + scattering.. I was definitely less optimizing things in the past on my 32gbs workstation and IR was working much smoother.. with much higher polycount at that..  One more thing that comes to mind was that maybe I must update the older proxies to "newer version" as well? Could that increase the performance?

I can try to give an update on the situation after I start a new scene from the scratch in C4, but that can take some time .. :) But well anyway, C3Hf2 have basically no issues with IR while C4 working with same scene is hardly ever responding..

Anyway I would be very glad if you make this a priority as fast IR is a must in nowadays standards..

Cheers

[TomG]

Hi David!

A copy of the scene that worked in 3 but not in 4 would be extremely helpful. https://corona-renderer.com/upload

Cheers!

[fraine7]

ATTN: THIS THREAD WAS STARTED BY A SPAMBOT, BUT IT RESULTED IN A REASONABLE DISCUSSION, SO I WILL LEAVE IT.
ORIGINAL POST: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=18091.0
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTN.

I started the original thread. Not sure I’ve ever been called a spambot before, I can assure you I’m a real boy ;)

[Jpjapers]

<snip>

I started the original thread. Not sure I’ve ever been called a spambot before, I can assure you I’m a real boy ;)

Nigan was the spambot and duplicated your post from your thread i think.

[fraine7]

ATTN: THIS THREAD WAS STARTED BY A SPAMBOT, BUT IT RESULTED IN A REASONABLE DISCUSSION, SO I WILL LEAVE IT.
ORIGINAL POST: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=18091.0
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTN.

I started the original thread. Not sure I’ve ever been called a spambot before, I can assure you I’m a real boy ;)

Nigan was the spambot and duplicated your post from your thread i think.

Thanks Jp - that makes sense

[maru]

Hi guys,

speaking from my own recent experience, I personally had quite an issue with IR in Corona 4. It was so annoying I just downgraded to C3hf2 for that reason, maybe it was due to some things still being on legacy settings, but as I needed it to work afap I just decided to finish the project in C3 instead..  I spent almost whole week trying out what the culprit was, couldn't identify it (re-saving layer by layer etc.)..  But it was really very very unresponsive, like waiting several minutes for IR to start reacting every time I moved the camera or changed any settings, and I still had a lot of RAM available..

Although I think it may have been due to quite heavy CoronaDistanceMap usage in mix with the CoronaScatter and proxies? Maybe that is something you could try to recreate to investigate this further, like a lot of various object/proxies in distance maps + scattering.. I was definitely less optimizing things in the past on my 32gbs workstation and IR was working much smoother.. with much higher polycount at that..  One more thing that comes to mind was that maybe I must update the older proxies to "newer version" as well? Could that increase the performance?

I can try to give an update on the situation after I start a new scene from the scratch in C4, but that can take some time .. :) But well anyway, C3Hf2 have basically no issues with IR while C4 working with same scene is hardly ever responding..

Anyway I would be very glad if you make this a priority as fast IR is a must in nowadays standards..

Cheers

Hi David!

A copy of the scene that worked in 3 but not in 4 would be extremely helpful. https://corona-renderer.com/upload

Cheers!

^this :)

[danio1011]

I just uploaded a stripped down scene to the Dropbox Uploader ('Slow Forest Pack Example_1.zip') where I would consider the performance with Forest Pack to be atypically poor.  The viewport drops to about 1-2 fps and the interface becomes extremely sluggish during IR.  I am starting to think the culprit is either the surface that the Forest Pack item is scattered on (stacked modifiers, maybe) or else using 'Areas' within Forest Pack to include\exclude scatter points.  The amount of geometry scattered is not excessive at all.  I even experimented with reducing the amount of gravel to a small area and it was still slow, so it seems less about the amount of scattered elements.  This is starting to be my typical experience with Corona and Forest Pack with any kind of a moderately complex scattering setup, whereas with VRay Next it's quite fast even with more demanding Forest Pack scenes.

This is slow in IR using both the latest stable build and also the latest daily, I haven't tried it with older builds due to deadlines.  This is in 3ds Max 2016 using a threadripper 1950x and a 1080 Ti and Forest Pack 6.2.1.  Let me know if you don't get the file or need any other info.  It would be fantastic to see IR get a performance bump with Forest Pack for V5!

[cgbeast]

Has the IR been changed?  When I run it and move around it updates in realtime but at a certain point the image gets denoised causing blurry blotches.  The examples shown are just getting refined over time.  Any idea?

[TomG]

Changed since when? :) IR had NVIDIA AI denoising added back in Corona 3 , and that is what you are seeing kicking in. You turn it off by disabling "Fast preview denoise during render" if you don't want it running during IR.

(EDIT note that that is different from using denoising, NVIDIA or otherwise, in the final render, which is controlled in the usual drop down)

[cgbeast]

Sweet...Just started using Corona, so big newb.

[TomG]

Aha ok! Look for that checkbox in the Performance tab, to change whether NVIDIA denoising is used during IR. While blurry at first, it will clean up quickly as IR does more passes, of course.

[cgbeast]

Where so I find the switch to disable it?

[TomG]

In the Performance tab - see https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/12000004976-how-to-use-denoising-

[romullus]

It's funny to see how some people don't like interactive denoiser. For me it's the best thing since sliced bread. When my old GPU died, i had to live without denoiser for almost month... it was nightmare!

[alexyork]

It's funny to see how some people don't like interactive denoiser. For me it's the best thing since sliced bread. When my old GPU died, i had to live without denoiser for almost month... it was nightmare!

It's amazing while testing overall lighting, exposure, colours, compositions etc. But as soon as you're working on fine detail textures e.g. carpets/rugs/fabrics/plants/grass then it becomes unusable really, since it crushes all the detail away and seems to take even longer to clean up than if you just turn it off. So it totally has it's uses.

On that note, because this topic reminded me, can we have a right-click IR/docked menu item to quickly enable/disable this, please? :)

[romullus]

On that note, because this topic reminded me, can we have a right-click IR/docked menu item to quickly enable/disable this, please? :)

Oh yeah, that's a good idea! I think you should request this in dedicated topic on feature request board.

[Frood]

On that note, because this topic reminded me, can we have a right-click IR/docked menu item to quickly enable/disable this, please? :)

Meanwhile(?) a macroscript as button/shortcut. Unfortunately it restarts IR when toggling, should not happen when it gets implemented natively someday.


Good Luck

[selene]

Since I think this topic is related to the issue we are currently investigating, I'm going to pin here a link to the poll and topic dedicated to solving this problem: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=26333.0

As TomG and Maru already mentioned, please report us any specific case, ideally a 3DS Max scene, which you think is relevant to solving the issues with Interactive Rendering slowdowns - it would really help us a lot :). We would really like to deeply investigate it, but we struggle to reproduce it ourselves. Most of the time we get such feedback, our users don't provide us with needed information or example scenes, so it is really hard to find cause of this problem.

Thank you very much for any information which could lead to solving this issue :)

Have a nice day,
s.