Chaos Corona Forum

Chaos Corona for 3ds Max => [Max] I need help! => Topic started by: miragemig on 2015-05-18, 08:44:07

Title: Corona Interactive
Post by: miragemig on 2015-05-18, 08:44:07
Hello guys
Is there a way to make Interactive rendering distributed (DR)?
If not, is that in near future?
Regardz...
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: Ludvik Koutny on 2015-05-18, 10:37:19
Interactive rendering is always about very fast feedback. About working with scene in realtime. At the same time, DR is not something that is realtime in nature. Transferring data over network and waiting for slaves to initialize and do their thing takes seconds, sometimes even minutes to happen, while with interactive rendering, hundreds or even tens of milliseconds matter. So I would not count on this.
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: cecofuli on 2015-05-18, 12:34:10
 Rawalanche, V-Ray RT in CPU DR, from what I remember, was very good. Why not to have the possibility to use all my renderfarm in DR? It's my choose.
I prefer to lose some FPS, but obtain a better, clean images in 1/10 of time.
If you have to transfer only a new camera position or lights intensity, isn't' so "heavy", not?
I think, soon or later, also Corona must do the same.
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: maru on 2015-05-18, 13:12:46
The official answer was, as Rawalanche wrote, that IR is not designed for such use. Maybe it will be planned in the future, but I guess it will never be a high-priority feature.
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: Ludvik Koutny on 2015-05-18, 14:10:50
Rawalanche, V-Ray RT in CPU DR, from what I remember, was very good. Why not to have the possibility to use all my renderfarm in DR? It's my choose.
I prefer to lose some FPS, but obtain a better, clean images in 1/10 of time.
If you have to transfer only a new camera position or lights intensity, isn't' so "heavy", not?
I think, soon or later, also Corona must do the same.

Yes, if you do not need fast feedback but need fast rendering, then you do not need IR in first place. You can always do the change and hit F9. It will basically be same thing. What i mean is that IR with DR would not be any faster than re-rendering manually every time. It would completely lost all of the IR benefits.
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: lacilaci on 2015-05-18, 14:23:05
I think some people still believe there is some different engine used for IR than for regular rendering... like, super fast low quality rendering engine...

I think the difference is only faster refresh rate and lower gi/aa ratio + lower uhd cache settings... something you can manually do and use DR if you don't need interactivity

what is the point having DR for IR while loosing interactivity performance...??

I'm really curious cause unless I'm wrong and there is some different magic behind IR rendering, there is no point of distributing Interactive rendering... or is it???
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: miragemig on 2015-05-18, 21:01:57
hello guys

My question was not innocent....
One thing i´m amazed is  about Octane  DR beetwin GPUs....
In my line of work (architect) is impotant to have that instant feedback, for clients view.
Since Octane gives that feedback using DR with several GPUS, i was  asking why not corona with CPUs?

Regardz
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: arqrenderz on 2015-05-18, 21:08:12
I think it need to re-write  the dr code for it to work.
but hell yeah it would be a great option!
Anyway, im still getting dissapearing proxys and stuff using dr on the office (all latest corona update Stable version)
All unc paths and stuff ...
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: Ludvik Koutny on 2015-05-18, 21:08:31
hello guys

My question was not innocent....
One thing i´m amazed is  about Octane  DR beetwin GPUs....
In my line of work (architect) is impotant to have that instant feedback, for clients view.
Since Octane gives that feedback using DR with several GPUS, i was  asking why not corona with CPUs?

Regardz

Are those GPUs in one machine? If you have dual processor or quad processor machine, interactive will take advantage of all the processors.
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: miragemig on 2015-05-18, 21:19:38
hello

No the GPUs are in severaal computers, In the exactelly 3 GPUs in 4 machines.. 12 GPUs giving imediatly feedback.

Is corona could do this ... it would be out of this world for CPU rendering base users..

Regardz

Oh!  GPUs are 12 Titans X :)
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: cecofuli on 2015-05-19, 02:52:49
Rawalanche, often you want to defend at all costs Corona... You should be more "unbiased" ;-)
Try to use VRay-RT in DR mode and, you will see with your eyes, there isn't so big difference (viewport feedback) if you mode camera, object or change color, shader, etc..
Ok, if you merge a 10.000.000 poligon object, you have to share the new mesh over the network and wait a bit. In local mode it will be faster, obviously.
I remember a video where a guy used 10 nodes with VRay-RT CPU. Very fast and super feedback.
As some user already say, also Octane has a very good IR DR service. Why not Corona?
With IR DR, you will not loose interactivity performance. Just look at VRay and Octane.
And, for me, it's an high priority.
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: Ludvik Koutny on 2015-05-19, 10:26:27
Rawalanche, often you want to defend at all costs Corona... You should be more "unbiased" ;-)
Try to use VRay-RT in DR mode and, you will see with your eyes, there isn't so big difference (viewport feedback) if you mode camera, object or change color, shader, etc..
Ok, if you merge a 10.000.000 poligon object, you have to share the new mesh over the network and wait a bit. In local mode it will be faster, obviously.
I remember a video where a guy used 10 nodes with VRay-RT CPU. Very fast and super feedback.
As some user already say, also Octane has a very good IR DR service. Why not Corona?
With IR DR, you will not loose interactivity performance. Just look at VRay and Octane.
And, for me, it's an high priority.

For you, everything is high priority ;)

I am actually very unbiased. I have tried probably all the rendering solutions out there, and i criticize corona a LOT when there is something fundametally wrong. You basically answered yourself. If you do some heavy mesh operations that require re-synchronization of the scene, it will take a while. You need to keep in mind IR in Corona allows you to do a lot more than VrayRT. But it also comes at a cost.

In VrayRT sure, you can use DR, and you will get feedback from all the computers. First several passes are probably rendered locally, but once all the remote machines finish their job, they add their computations to the result. The problem here is that sending scene updates to the remote machines, letting them render the stuff and send it back usually wastes as much time as re-rendering scene in regular mode from scratch. So you won't gain any speed. IR is really meant to tweak your scene, not to render final image. It would be probably possible to do IR with DR, but the amount of work and hustle would not be worth the result.

So basically, if you launched IR with DR, and you would change your scene, the time it would take for computations of DR machines to show up in your VFB would be similar to the time it would take you to launch regular (not IR) rendering with DR enabled.

They will always show you demos with stuff like iPads or cars on a plane where this will work. But once you get into a real scene, things won't be so efficient anymore.
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: miragemig on 2015-05-19, 12:17:50

Hello guys

Rawalanche
 i agree with you when you say IR is for tweak  scenes... the problem is when those scenes are heavy, and a user like me that use  a 4 core I7 (8HT) , starts to get trouble using IR because scenes are heavy. And feed back starts to get time, o much time.
So i believe that IR with DR in corona would be a great imput to Corona users, and also a "boom" to those who don´t  have  money to buy several GPUs...
buy the way.. tehre is coming the new Pascal Nvidia GPU...  It seens to be worth look at it...i believe that it will be a "revolution", Octane and GPU basead renders will boost the market.
That is what i believe.

regardz
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: cecofuli on 2015-05-19, 12:25:10
Rawalanche, mmm... when you have an heavy interior scene , also in Corona IR the interactivity performance is very slow.
Also for a simple task like change sun position, move an object or change camera position (80% of Corona IR usage is for this task). You have no fast preview.
You have to wait.. I don't know... 10-15 seconds.
Often, when the scene is heavy, it's easier to run a crop randering in production mode, than to run IR, because it's fast to tweak parameters, and you can have less noise.
Well.. try to think to use 10 node in IR... in 10 second, you can have a much less noise and better feedback! This is the point!
If you prefer, you can turn off the DR and you, probably, more interactivity performance, but you have to wait more for a clean preview.
 I'm sure: Corona IR + IR render region will make many users very happy ;-)
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: Ludvik Koutny on 2015-05-19, 13:01:55
Well, that was my point. With DR, you would get even slower feedback in heavy scenes. You would get scenes cleaner a lot faster, but it would take a lot longer for that cleaning up to start.
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: cecofuli on 2015-05-19, 13:22:29
I'm not 100% sure that, with heavy scene and DR, you'll get slower feedback...
In V-Ray the interactivity performance is near the same in DR or in Local.
Ok, you have to wait more for the first step, because you have to share all the stuff inside network. But this isn't th main topic of this discussion.
I don't understand why you continue to you continue to argue the opposite. For example, you can change the V-Ray bundle size to get a better interactivity performance.
And, I prefer to wait 1-2 seconds and to get in 10 seconds (with 5 nodes for example) a clean preview, instead to wait 50 sec for the same result with one machine.

Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: Ludvik Koutny on 2015-05-19, 13:33:03
Yes, that's Vray. But i am sure you very well know Corona DR is nowhere near Vray level, so I can't imagine current system working realiably with interactive rendering. As i said in my previous post, i do not think it's impossible, but there needs to be a lot of steps taken before this could turn into usable solution. There are also lots of things of higher priority, be it hair rendering, skin shader, adaptivity, proper refraction handling, improving reliability of regular distributed rendering, etc...

It's really not as easy as simply switching on current DR for IR mode.
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: cecofuli on 2015-05-19, 18:18:05
Yes, I know a little =)
I can understand that it isn't easy to implement it. But, I think, it's very useful to have IR in DR mode.
And, we will have no IR slower feedback (except when you add a new, heavy geometry), because we know Corona's guys ;-) 
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: Ondra on 2015-05-19, 23:20:17
about rawalanche: as a rule of thumb, he has just strong opinions - not necessarily always in favor of Corona ;)

about personal jabs of any kind - please stop them

about DR vs. interactive - the problem is the way Corona interactive is implemented - everything supported, everything works as final rendering - it would be probably possible to do a different model "send scene to all machines, wait a while, and then have fast camera viewport updates" and record nice demos with it. But transmitting all scene changes would be much more complicated/slower.

In the end, we are currently happy with existing IR and we will focus on more new features, stability and performance fixes, before investigating options of DR+IR
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: MarkusB. on 2016-06-28, 13:53:01
I know it has been a while since something was posted here. But what is the status on IR with DR?
Is this still something you are investigating or did you dropped the idea completely?
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: Ondra on 2016-06-28, 14:20:07
we still have no plans to do it
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: Benny on 2016-07-05, 06:12:30
I don't know if this is a totally different discussion, but I understand Corona is only using CPU for IR as this allows for identical functionality and code between final render and IR. I also remember another argument was that CPUs are getting more and more cores, and that you don't have worry about fitting your scene in VRAM, and that this trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

It's been a while since Corona alpha now and I wonder if the same still holds true? With some nvidia cards having 12GB and rumored to go to 16GB for the next Titan it seems CPUs will have a tough time keeping up. A 10 core 6950 is $1,600 and Xeons even more, whereas a Titan X is about $1,000.

Is it time for Corona to consider a GPU strategy for the future, or is the CPU track still the way to go?

Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: danio1011 on 2016-12-18, 05:38:34
Hi all, sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I'm assuming still no plans for IR + DR?  Twould be sweet :)
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: Benny on 2016-12-18, 07:15:02
I don't know if this is a totally different discussion, but I understand Corona is only using CPU for IR as this allows for identical functionality and code between final render and IR. I also remember another argument was that CPUs are getting more and more cores, and that you don't have worry about fitting your scene in VRAM, and that this trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

It's been a while since Corona alpha now and I wonder if the same still holds true? With some nvidia cards having 12GB and rumored to go to 16GB for the next Titan it seems CPUs will have a tough time keeping up. A 10 core 6950 is $1,600 and Xeons even more, whereas a Titan X is about $1,000.

Is it time for Corona to consider a GPU strategy for the future, or is the CPU track still the way to go?

Almost six months later I also wonder if anything has changed on the GPU front?
Title: Re: Corona Interactive
Post by: maru on 2016-12-21, 11:58:50
No plans for IR+DR - the reasons are the same as previously - we want to keep IR responsive.

No plans for GPU rendering in any foreseeable future. We might however offload some other tasks to GPU, such as VFB post processing. There is a huge list of reasons why we don't want to switch to GPU. We are planning to release an official blog post, or other kind of article, explaining why exactly we believe in the CPU.