Chaos Corona Forum

Chaos Corona for Cinema 4D => [C4D] I need help! => Topic started by: c4d019 on 2019-05-21, 16:59:02

Title: Preparing geometry
Post by: c4d019 on 2019-05-21, 16:59:02
I'm trying to figure out a solution to this problem, not sure if it's C4D or Corona problem but when rendering an animation each frame takes longer than the last, it appears to be at the 'preparing geometry' stage and gradually increases in each passing frame.

When I restart C4D and begin the render from the from the last frame the 'preparing geometry' stage is fast again, but increases with every next frame.

At this rate it will take a very long time to get this project finished.

Can anyone help?

Thanks.
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: houska on 2019-05-21, 17:41:43
Hi, could we see your scene so that we can figure out what is causing these delays? You can use our private uploader (see my signature below) if the project needs to stay private.

Otherwise, it's a shot in the dark... Actually - are you using any plugins other than Corona? It could also be that some of them is misbehaving
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: c4d019 on 2019-05-21, 20:24:25
Uploaded to dropbox.

No plugins in scene and when dof and motion blur are enabled the increase in render time between each frame is much greater than if they were disabled.

Frame range setup from 180 to 250 to hopefully illustrate the problem.

Thanks.
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Philip kelly on 2019-05-22, 08:09:22
Sorry for dropping in on this question.
Are you running the file from Dropbox?
That could be the issue , because of the bandwidth.
If your not, apologies.
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: houska on 2019-05-22, 10:37:00
Are you running the file from Dropbox?

I suppose they're not. The mentioned Dropbox folder is our private folder for users to share their scenes :-)
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: c4d019 on 2019-05-24, 01:03:15
Any idea when I will receive some feedback regarding the above issue?

Thanks.
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: houska on 2019-05-24, 10:16:24
Hi, we were investigating the issue yesterday and there definitely seems to be something weird happening. We did reproduce the slowdowns, but were unable to find out what causes them. We'll keep you posted if we find out something.

P.S.: You should use more instancing ;-)
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: c4d019 on 2019-05-24, 15:51:52
Thanks, yes I probably should have instanced more items as I'm new to cinema 4d, I'm also pretty good at breaking software so feel free to include me in the next alpha :)
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Merlin on 2019-06-23, 15:07:44
Hi,
I have a similare problem:
More than 4mn of parsing scene, every time I stop the IR and restart it, it's TOO LONG!!!

Corona is very badly handling the memory, I have a out of memory on a scene of architecture with some grass and 10 trees, yet I have 32gb of Ram and only 54% are used. There's an inconsistency somewhere, right?  Tonight I made a rendering and C4D had bugged at the end of 3H30 and impossible to save the rendering, it's INTOLERABLE!!!

Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Designerman77 on 2019-06-23, 18:01:27
Merlin, from my experience, the parsing takes longer if I have plenty of displacement in a scene.
My RAM is unfortunately also „only“ 32 Gigs.

Try to switch off displacement on objects where it’s anyway not really necessary.

I‘m curious if it will help.

Edit: I saw that you use Mograph cloner... From my experience it’s quite slow, ineffective and slows down the scenes. This is why I use Laubwerk. Works more RAM-friendly.
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Merlin on 2019-06-23, 19:02:25
hi Designerman77,
Thanks for your help but,
I just ran a test without displacement and I win nothing …
On the other hand I still have this low Ram message that does not match the information displayed on Istat menu …

and how do you explain that the same scene tested with Redshift only takes a few seconds to analyze and shows no memory problems?
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Designerman77 on 2019-06-23, 22:23:37
Hey Merlin,

that sounds indeed concerning. Okay, Displacement was just a guess, though it seemed quite clear that there is probably not much in the scene.

Are you on the latest Corona? Official release I mean?

P.S. I also experienced similar error warning on my machine, but only on big scenes rendered in 4K.
I thought, maybe indeed the 32 GB are a bit spartanic. Will update it.

Remarkably, this error message appears AFTER the render was calculated.
At you it appears before?

Also on my machine it never caused crashes or anything. Simply appeared without any negative effect.
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Merlin on 2019-06-24, 00:01:23
Sometime before, sometime after It seems to me.
I couldn't finish my rendering in 1920px and I had to decline to 1500px.

I have another different problem, and it is not the first time I have the BloomGlare pass which is displayed correctly in the VFB and it is completely black in the viewer
It's incomprehensible to me, see the picture bellow.
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Designerman77 on 2019-06-24, 03:17:31
Do you always render out so many different passes? You need all of them? I think this needs huge amount of RAM... This might explain your RAM running low. 
1500pix image...that’s super tiny. Actually no RAM-eater.

I don’t know the requirements to your renders... but me personally I try to keep the post as little as possible. Because the more one fiddles around in post, the higher the risk to make a physically correct render (or photo) look more and more unnatural.

At least this is my observation.
That’s why I try to get the raw render as good as possible...
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Merlin on 2019-06-24, 09:47:05
yes I agree with you and I also spend a lot of time doing rendering tests to get the best possible result, but when the rendering is finished we always surprises in post.
My passes are basic + a few masks + a few lights.

And I don't know why my BloomGlare pass stays black?

Look at the screen capture, do you think that's a lot of passes?

Thanks
Title: Re: Preparing geometr
Post by: Designerman77 on 2019-06-24, 18:34:30
Hey Merlin, as I am a total „Passes-Minimalist“, mabe my workflow is not representative.
Just at first sight, I was surprised that you render out so many separate passes.
So, yes, to me those are lots of them.

I guess I will also once experiment around with what benefit I can gain in post with some of these passes like Z-depth, etc... I understand what they do, but as I mentioned...in the past I so often destroyed pictures‘ natural look in post, just to return to the original plus a bit of curves, sharpness in the focus, a bit of desaturation and basics like these... :)))

Honestly, in a lot of tutorials or archviz-articles you see all kind of post-processing wizards... and the „final“ images look somehow „manipulated“ after post.


Long talk short: did you switch off all passes and try how the render / RAM behaves then?
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Merlin on 2019-06-24, 19:56:26
hi Designerman77,
I've reduced the format again and took half of AOVs, but it doesn't change anything.
I remain convinced that Corona is using the memory very badly...
See below
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Designerman77 on 2019-06-24, 21:55:28
Hey Merlin,

you made me curious on this topic. I think tomorrow I‘m going to recreate something similar and check out how it behaves on my system & machine.

Greetings
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Merlin on 2019-06-24, 22:05:32
Ok,
some screen capture just for informations:

Good luck
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Designerman77 on 2019-06-24, 22:07:58
Cool ! Thanks! :)

Do you make the single blade of grass from one poly, ore more?
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Designerman77 on 2019-06-25, 13:49:33
Hey Merlin. Yesterday I tested the BloomGlare Multipass. It saves correctly at me.

At you the layer is black also when you save the image as TIF or PSD, or only in the C4D Viewport?
Title: Re: Preparing geometry
Post by: Merlin on 2019-06-25, 15:07:39
Yeah, it's the same in Photoshop, which is why it s more embarrassing.
But I removed the lightmix and light AOV's and it's come back...