mantra health indicator

[smaugthewyrm]

ok, guys,

i am rendering out a single frame that so far is well over 70hrs. in the render scheduler i can see the timer clicking off hours, but i am now questioning the process.

in the past, this same frame too 18hrs, BUT i have zoomed in a bit so i expected a longer render time as the 'tough' aspect is now 30% of the frame. (water spash raytraced)

i set mantra to render out to disk in a .pic format.

on render, mantra wrote out a 4kb .pic file in the correct directory BUT its kb size has not changed... even this didn't see very strange as i would expect a temp file somewhere

caching as the buckets progressed with only the final pic being written to the final destination.

furthermore, cpu load has been aprox 75% for all this time. not solid but in that range.

is there anywhere an error would be written should one occur? is there anywhere a percentage of complete is shown since i am not rendering to IP mplay?

gads, i hate to panic and stop a render i am so far into, but also i feel the fool for letting it go so long with no indication of progression.

in mantra i did not set set the verbose level, vex profiling or alfred style progress... which i have done in the past but never figured out where on macintosh i would show said alfred progress...

since i did not configure verbosity, is there ANY way to make an informed decision as to kill or allow this render to continue on.

sheesh... please help guys. thanks.

specs: cpu: macpro 2.6ghz quad xeon, 8gb ram, H11.0.504

frame: ray tracing rendering engine - pixel samples 6x6, ray samples min max 1 9, reflect refract limit both 10 (default) rendered frame dimensions pixels 2775 x 3338

Edited May 26, 2012 by smaugthewyrm

[LaidlawFX]

ok, guys,

i am rendering out a single frame that so far is well over 70hrs. in the render scheduler i can see the timer clicking off hours, but i am now questioning the process.

in the past, this same frame too 18hrs, BUT i have zoomed in a bit so i expected a longer render time as the 'tough' aspect is now 30% of the frame. (water spash raytraced)

i set mantra to render out to disk in a .pic format.

on render, mantra wrote out a 4kb .pic file in the correct directory BUT its kb size has not changed... even this didn't see very strange as i would expect a temp file somewhere

caching as the buckets progressed with only the final pic being written to the final destination.

furthermore, cpu load has been aprox 75% for all this time. not solid but in that range.

is there anywhere an error would be written should one occur? is there anywhere a percentage of complete is shown since i am not rendering to IP mplay?

gads, i hate to panic and stop a render i am so far into, but also i feel the fool for letting it go so long with no indication of progression.

in mantra i did not set set the verbose level, vex profiling or alfred style progress... which i have done in the past but never figured out where on macintosh i would show said alfred progress...

since i did not configure verbosity, is there ANY way to make an informed decision as to kill or allow this render to continue on.

sheesh... please help guys. thanks.

i would have upped a hip file, but am afraid to 'save as' while the render is ongoing.

hip file and all dependencies 289MB (hip bgeo rat ai etc)

http://www.moondeer....HOUDINIproj.zip

specs: cpu: macpro 2.6ghz quad xeon, 8gb ram, H11.0.504

frame: ray tracing rendering engine - pixel samples 6x6, ray samples min max 1 9, reflect refract limit both 10 (default) rendered frame dimensions pixels 2775 x 3338

Here is some help, I didn't set your render off I just took a cursory glance most of it isn't anything major. I'm just going to state what I see as I saw it that will cause increases in render time.

1. I hope you tested using a smaller image than a 10k by 5k image, even saved as a .rat that's huge file.

2. You need to cache your simulation out to disk you seem to be running a live simulation which is bad. I think this is your biggest problem.

3. depending on which mantra rop node your using you got some crazy settings, most are just basic but some are huge.

mantraPBR Foam - Pixel Samples are at 23 23 turn that down, diffuse limit use pbr and pbr based shader, and use the indirect light to speed up these calculations, odds are you don't need the diffuse bounces. Max ray samples 16 is probably required, but I would check to see if that can go down. Verbose level 5 will take a lot of time for the render engine to spit out that much info, verbose three is usually set, you need to launch it from a terminal in mac or linux. Your spitting out two position images planes that will take alot of time for redundancy.

mantraRay - you have raytracing with diffuse bounces not the best pair up of render setting if you need the diffuse bounces try a pbr engine, if you need the raytracing turn up your raytrace accelerator.

I would be more liberal with your tile size, increaseing doesn't allways improve it you need to test and find the sweet spot for your scene.

4. you camera size is big so that will take a while to render, but your render times you reported are kind of ridiculously high.

5. test render to mplay and you can click on the screen to see how things are going.

Use a format such as .exr you can allways view your images while they render even if they fail half way through. There is a render diagnostic image plane which tell you per a pixel how long it takes to render a scene. Mantra does not have a temp file externally and then does a final dump to the image, the image progressively gets bigger(Way too many hours of watching those things go by)