Animation & Scene Parsing

[Nejc Kilar]

Hello peeps,

So I'm not really sure if this was discussed before or not but was there ever a request to have Corona more animation "friendly" by working on reducing the scene parsing times?

Right now each time a new frame loads you need to go through that same ol, same ol scene parsing calculation phase. While that is in a way to be expected there are other path tracers out there that load the scene just once and so each subsequent frame has like a 99% reduction in parsing times. The other render engine I used that did things this way was a GPU based renderer so I'm not sure if maybe thats a pro of the way they can quickly access things stored in VRAM whereas with CPU rendering that access might be a bit slower :)

With the other renderer scene parsing times were like 30 second for the scene to load but then each next frame only took like 2 seconds to load up and it was already rendering. Now imagine the animation you are working on is 1000 frames long and you can see that we are talking lots of hours of compute time spared :)

I know there are some scene parsing improvements already listed on Trello but I'm not sure if the same thing I'm talking about. Also, sorry if this has been suggested before :)

Any thoughts perhaps?

[Giona]

This is a request that I made some times ago, and I think they're working on it.
It would be a super improvement, especially for heavy scenes that takes few minutes to parse :)

[Nejc Kilar]

Completely agree and I'm happy it was requested before :) Maybe this will nudge it a bit again, heh :)

[pokoy]

I've wondered about this too in the past, not sure why there's no saving of redundant steps/data processing.

[agentdark45]

This! At least there should be a checkbox to keep the scene loaded into RAM for those who have enough physical RAM to not have to parse the scene on each frame.

[Stefan_]

This could be a game changer.
I could give the client more versions of a video job.
Speedup the workflow up to 8 times.

[vblackrender.]

We definetely need that feature! +1

[jms.lwly]

+1

When I'm testing camera angles and lighting setup, I'll often keep an IR window running - and flick from one camera to the next - which parses almost instantly - it seems frustrating that each view takes so much longer each time to parse / calculate when rendering a 'proper' image.

[maru]

The "Rewriting scene parsing - making second rendering parsing much faster, making scrubbing timeline in IR much faster" Trello item will be most likely what you are looking forward to. There are of course some limitations, like how successfully we are able to detect if something has / hasn't changed between the frames.

If you have a scene which would definitely benefit from this (i.e. per-frame parsing time is super long), as usual we are interested in investigating as we may use it as a benchmark for our improvement in the future.

[Nejc Kilar]

This is huge pro for any and all animation work I do with Corona - really excited it is getting traction!

It's mostly scenes with heavier displacement or heavier geo. So to generalize a bit, any scene with lots of objects or dense meshes that result in higher scene parsing and geo calculation times is a prime candidate. Shaving off even 20 seconds of a 2 minute frame is really solid and up to a point where it comes close to not having to have to upgrade the farm for it.

I'm on C4D primarily but I can send a couple of scenes over if need be :)

Oh and thank you for keeping tabs on these topics, I for one really appreciate it!

[maru]

This is huge pro for any and all animation work I do with Corona - really excited it is getting traction!

It's mostly scenes with heavier displacement or heavier geo. So to generalize a bit, any scene with lots of objects or dense meshes that result in higher scene parsing and geo calculation times is a prime candidate. Shaving off even 20 seconds of a 2 minute frame is really solid and up to a point where it comes close to not having to have to upgrade the farm for it.

I'm on C4D primarily but I can send a couple of scenes over if need be :)

Oh and thank you for keeping tabs on these topics, I for one really appreciate it!

Thanks, and if you can send over one or more scenes, that would be perfect. Of course they will be kept confidential and used for debugging only. You know the drill :) https://corona-renderer.com/upload

[Nejc Kilar]

Got it, will send a couple of them over. Thank you! :)

[maru]

Got some goodies from Nejc and logged for the devs to review.

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