Parsing scene taking way too long

[AlbertoMaciel]

Hello guys!
I'm finally done building my "homemade" render farm with 3 Threadripppers, so I can jump on more complex animations.... at least that's what I thought.

On my first animation rendering test, the rendering itself is going extremely fast (3x Threadrippers 3995x) BUT the parsing time on DRServer is just absurd.
some more info:
- The scene itself (with all the textures and proxies), has 400mb
- Some animated vegetation distributed using ForestPack
- Each frame is taking about 4 min to render using all the 3 pc's

The "parsing scene" step is taking 16 minutes per frame and consumes 115 gb of ram. At this point, is just faster to render on a single PC, which is totally nonsense.

I'm not a developer but why transfer the same data over and over again for each frame, if it's the exact same project? It's not totally counter-intuitive?

My questions:
There's a way to keep the scene loaded on slaves to make it usable?
Using alternative distributed renders like Deadline, the scene will be parsed for each frame, in the same way?

[Blanco]

Hi Alberto.
I raised the same issue here https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=38987.0
The Corona team know there is an issue with FP and RC and suggested installing the latest daily build which they say may tackle the problem - I haven’t tried this yet.

People have mentioned using the instancing engine in RC but this did nothing apart from make the random RC materials not work.

If all else fails and your PC can handle it, collapse all RC objects to meshes. This should help - I went from 90 seconds to parse scene to 0 seconds. If it’s still an issue then you may have to collapse FP objects too (ouch!J.

Best of luck.

[Blanco]

Woah. You have 3x 3995wx? Nice!

[Avi]

Hi Alberto,

In response to your first question, "Is there a way to keep the scene loaded on slaves to make it usable?", we have this request logged in our system for further review by our developers.

(Internal ID=974574200)

Regarding your second question about the parsing scene taking too long, we would like to gather some more information to help us understand the issue you are experiencing. Can you please let us know the following:

1. What versions of Forest Pack, Corona, and 3ds Max you are using?
2. Are you using displacement in the animated vegetation in your scene? If so, could you try disabling the displacement for the entire scene by unchecking the "Displacement" option in the "Common" tab in the Corona Render setup dialog and see if it helps improve the parsing time?

[AlbertoMaciel]

Hi Alberto.
I raised the same issue here https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=38987.0
The Corona team know there is an issue with FP and RC and suggested installing the latest daily build which they say may tackle the problem - I haven’t tried this yet.

People have mentioned using the instancing engine in RC but this did nothing apart from make the random RC materials not work.

If all else fails and your PC can handle it, collapse all RC objects to meshes. This should help - I went from 90 seconds to parse scene to 0 seconds. If it’s still an issue then you may have to collapse FP objects too (ouch!J.

Best of luck.

Thanks, man! Yeah, collapsing FP objects isn't an option, the scene will be extremely big and unworkable. I'm not using RC on this one.
Yeah, I got a good deal on two Threadrippers and I decided to buy them so I could invest more in animations... Which is actually not being very intuitive. I absolutely love corona but some things are just light years behind V-ray... some weird compatibilities issues.

[AlbertoMaciel]

Hi Alberto,

In response to your first question, "Is there a way to keep the scene loaded on slaves to make it usable?", we have this request logged in our system for further review by our developers.

(Internal ID=974574200)

Regarding your second question about the parsing scene taking too long, we would like to gather some more information to help us understand the issue you are experiencing. Can you please let us know the following:

1. What versions of Forest Pack, Corona, and 3ds Max you are using?
2. Are you using displacement in the animated vegetation in your scene? If so, could you try disabling the displacement for the entire scene by unchecking the "Displacement" option in the "Common" tab in the Corona Render setup dialog and see if it helps improve the parsing time?

Thank you for answering me! The info you requested:
- ForestPack 7.4.3, Corona 9 hotfix 1, 3ds Max 2023.3
- I am using some displacement, yes. I disabled it to test. No affect on the parsing scene time.
and the "animation" is not that the mesh itself is animated, It's just some variation on FP "transform" tab, to simulate a little bit of trees moving with the wind.

[Avi]

Thank you for your reply. We are aware of a few known bugs when working with Itoo Forest Pack and Corona and have recently released some fixes in the Corona 10 Daily Builds. These fixes are as follows:

[iToo] Fixed issue where rendering materials restarted IR with ForestPack
[iToo] Fixed Corona is not using the mesh returned by Forest in "GetRenderMesh"
[iToo] Fixed Forest Pack objects not rendered in proxy mode
[iToo] Fixed Custom objects aren't rendered when FP render mode is set to Meshes
[iToo] Fixed ForestPack shows up in viewport but not in Render, after base object had quadremesher applied to it
[iToo] ForestPack - The instances are now assigned a more meaningful wire color

Can you please try the newer daily build version "corona-10-3dsmax-daily-2023-01-02.exe" and let us know if the problem persists?

You can download the daily build version from here: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=38385.0


Note: The daily builds are the newest, experimental versions of Corona Renderer intended mainly for testing purposes and to showcase the recently added features. They contain the latest bug fixes but are not guaranteed to be stable, and in some cases can even damage scene files.

Check this link to know more about it: https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4528206493329-Corona-for-3ds-Max-Daily-Builds-

[maru]

iToo have also released a new version of Forest Pack. It may be worth checking if the issues are fixed now (obviously keeping in mind the risks of using Corona daily builds):

https://www.itoosoft.com/blog/forest-pack-807-released